INTRODUCTORY NOTE.

THE years which Hawthorne passed in England were
outwardly the most successful, in worldly prosperity
the most abundant, and in other respects among the
happiest of his life; forming in the autumn of his career
a sort of counterpoise to the idyllic period spent
at the Old Manse. Of these years,--from the spring
of 1853 to June of 1860, excepting a part of 1858
and 1859, which interval was chiefly spent in Italy,--"Our
Old Home" was the literary outcome. Much
of the material composing the sketches in this volume
occurs in embryonic form in the "English Note-Books,"
which were then still veiled from publicity;
but various elements and touches of fancy were supplied by
the author's mood or memory at the instant of
writing. His impressions of England, outlined in the
"Note-Books" and scattered at random through many
pages, here assume a connected and artistic shape.

The articles embraced in "Our Old Home" were
begun at The Wayside, Concord, in 1862, and were
first published in the "Atlantic Monthly," which was
then edited by Mr. James T. Fields. Mr. Fields has
placed on record, in his "Yesterdays with Authors,"
the fullest memoranda now to be had relative to the
production of these sketches. Hawthorne, in speaking
of them, said to him: "We must remember that
there is a good deal of intellectual ice mingled with
this wine of memory." Indeed, he took a discouraged
tone regarding the work, and wrote, on forwarding
one of the manuscripts: "I hope you will like it,
for the subject seemed interesting to me when I was
on the spot, but I always feel a singular despondency
and heaviness of heart in reopening these old journals
now." At another time: "Heaven sees fit to visit
me with an unshakable conviction that all this series
of articles is good for nothing; but that is none of my
business, provided the public and you are of a different
opinion." It is probable that this down-hearted
mood was a part of the general depression which
weighed heavily upon Hawthorne from the beginning
of the civil war until his death, and was caused by the
unhappy state of the country. He looked back, also,
to his English sojourn as a pleasant experience never
likely to be repeated, and often longed to return to
the mother-country, which had entertained him so hospitably
and where he had made warm friends.

Some of these friends were startled, and perhaps a
little hurt, by the frankness of the characterizations
and criticisms which the book bestowed on the English.
Hawthorne, however, remarks in a letter to Mr.
Fields: "I really think Americans have more cause
than they to complain of me. Looking over the volume,
I am rather surprised to find that whenever I
draw a comparison between the two peoples, I almost
invariably east the balance against ourselves." And
it was from Americans, in fact, that Hawthorne received
the severest censure on the publication of "Our
Old Home," though for quite another cause than his
remarks on their national character. He had dedicated
the book to his old college-friend, Ex-President
Franklin Pierce, against whom popular opinion at the
North was then very bitter, on account of the attitude
of compromise taken by him towards the South while
he was Chief Magistrate of the Union, and his opposition
to the war and to emancipation. When remonstrated with
on his purpose of linking the volume
with Pierce's name, Hawthorne replied to Mr. Fields:
"I find that it would be a piece of poltroonery in me
to withdraw either the dedication or the dedicatory
letter. My long and intimate relations with Pierce
render the dedication altogether proper, especially as
regards this book, which would have had no existence
without his kindness; and if he is so exceedingly unpopular
that his name is enough to sink the volume,
there is so much the more need that an old friend
should stand by him. I cannot, merely on account of
pecuniary profit or literary reputation, go back from
what I have deliberately thought and felt it right to
do; and if I were to tear out the dedication, I should
never look at the volume again without remorse and
shame." The collection was accordingly published,
in the autumn of 1863, with the dedicatory note as it
now stands. As a literary performance "Our Old
Home" was received cordially, but the political and
personal indignation roused by the dedication was
deep. "My friends have dropped off from me like
autumn leaves," Hawthorne wrote to his old comrade,
Bridge, who, although in the ranks of the political
party opposed to Hawthorne's views, remained loyal
to him.

Of the story told about an erring doctor of divinity,
in the "Consular Experiences," the author wrote to
Mr. Fields: "It is every bit true (like the other anecdotes),
only not told so darkly as it might have
been for the reverend gentleman." Among some correspondence
the editor, a few years since, came upon
a letter addressed to Hawthorne respecting this very
point. The writer, who was a stranger, explained
that he had had a controversy with some friends, who
insisted that the circumstances narrated must have
been invented by the author for effect. On the envelope
Hawthorne made a memorandum to the effect
that the letter had been answered by an assurance that
the incident was an actual one. That this answer was
received and the question settled the editor recently
learned from the correspondent himself, who, curiously
enough, had removed from Illinois, where his letter
was written, and was occupying a house next to the
Wayside, where the "Consular Experiences" was
penned.

G. P. L.

TO
FRANKLIN PIERCE,
AS A SLIGHT MEMORIAL OF A COLLEGE FRIENDSHIP,
PROLONGED
THROUGH MANHOOD, AND RETAINING ALL ITS VITALITY
IN OUR AUTUMNAL YEARS,
THIS VOLUME
IS INSCRIBED BY
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.

TO A FRIEND.

I HAVE not asked your consent, my dear General, to
the foregoing inscription, because it would have been
no inconsiderable disappointment to me had you
withheld it; for I have long desired to connect your
name with some book of mine, in commemoration of an
early friendship that has grown old between two
individuals of widely dissimilar pursuits and
fortunes. I only wish that the offering were a
worthier one than this volume of sketches, which
certainly are not of a kind likely to prove
interesting to a statesman in retirement, inasmuch as
they meddle with no matters of policy or government,
and have very little to say about the deeper traits of
national character. In their humble way, they belong
entirely to æsthetic literature, and can achieve
no higher success than to represent to the American
reader a few of the external aspects of English
scenery and life, especially those that are touched
with the antique charm to which our countrymen are
more susceptible than are the people among whom it is
of native growth.

I once hoped, indeed, that so slight a volume would
not be all that I might write. These and other
sketches, with which in a somewhat rougher form than I
have given them here, my journal was copiously filled,
were intended for the side-scenes and backgrounds and
exterior adornment of a work of fictionof which the plan had imperfectly
developed itself in my mind, and into which I
ambitiously proposed to convey more of various modes
of truth than I could have grasped by a direct effort.
Of course, I should not mention this abortive project,
only that it has been utterly thrown aside and will
never now be accomplished. The Present, the Immediate,
the Actual, has proved too potent for me. It takes
away not only my scanty faculty, but even my desire
for imaginative composition, and leaves me sadly
content to scatter a thousand peaceful fantasies
upon the hurricane that is sweeping us all along with
it, possibly, into a Limbo where our nation and its
polity may be as literally the fragments of a
shattered dream as my unwritten Romance. But I have
far better hopes for our dear country; and for my
individual share of the catastrophe, I afflict myself
little, or not at all, and shall easily find room for
the abortive work on a certain ideal shelf, where are
reposited many other shadowy volumes of mine, more in
number, and very much superior in quality, to those
which I have succeeded in rendering actual.

To return to these poor Sketches: some of my
friends have told me that they evince an asperity of
sentiment towards the English people which I ought not
to feel, and which it is highly inexpedient to
express. The charge surprises me, because, if it be
true, I have written from a shallower mood than I
supposed. I seldom came into personal relations with
an Englishman without beginning to like him, and
feeling my favorable impression wax stronger with the
progress of the acquaintance. I never stood in an
English crowd without being conscious of hereditary
sympathies. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that anAmerican is continually
thrown upon his national antagonism by some acrid
quality in the moral atmosphere of England. These
people think so loftily of themselves, and so
contemptuously of everybody else, that it requires
more generosity than I possess to keep always in
perfectly good-humor with them. Jotting down the
little acrimonies of the moment in my journal, and
transferring them thence (when they happened to be
tolerably well expressed) to these pages, it is very
possible that I may have said things which a profound
observer of national character would hesitate to
sanction, though never any, I verily believe, that had
not more or less of truth. If they be true, there is
no reason in the world why they should not be said.
Not an Englishman of them all ever spared America for
courtesy's sake or kindness; nor, in my opinion,
would it contribute in the least to our mutual
advantage and comfort if we were to besmear one
another all over with butter and honey. At any rate,
we must not judge of an Englishman's
susceptibilities by our own, which likewise, I trust,
are of a far less sensitive texture than formerly.

And now farewell, my dear friend; and excuse (if
you think it needs any excuse) the freedom with which
I thus publicly assert a personal friendship between a
private individual and a statesman who has filled what
was then the most august position in the world. But I
dedicate my book to the Friend, and shall defer a
colloquy with the Statesman till some calmer and
sunnier hour. Only this let me say, that, with the
record of your life in my memory, and with a sense of
your character in my deeper consciousness as among the
few things that time has left as it found them, I need
no assurance that you continue faithful forever to
thatgrand idea of an
irrevocable Union, which, as you once told me, was the
earliest that your brave father taught you. For other
men there may be a choice of paths,--for you, but one;
and it rests among my certainties that no man's
loyalty is more steadfast, no man's hopes or
apprehensions on behalf of our national existence more
deeply heartfelt, or more closely intertwined with his
possibilities of personal happiness, than those of
FRANKLIN PIERCE.

THE WAYSIDE, July 2, 1863.

OUR OLD HOME.

CONSULAR EXPERIENCES.

THE Consulate of the United States, in my day, was
located in Washington Buildings (a shabby and
smoke-stained edifice of four stories high, thus
illustriously named in honor of our national
establishment), at the lower corner of Brunswick
Street, contiguous to the Goree Arcade, and in the
neighborhood of some of the oldest docks. This was by
no means a polite or elegant portion of England's
great commercial city, nor were the apartments of the
American official so splendid as to indicate the
assumption of much consular pomp on his part. A narrow
and ill-lighted staircase gave access to an equally
narrow and ill-lighted passageway on the first floor,
at the extremity of which, surmounting a door-frame,
appeared an exceedingly stiff pictorial representation
of the Goose and Gridiron, according to the English
idea of those ever-to-be-honored symbols. The
staircase and passageway were often thronged, of a
morning, with a set of beggarly and piratical-looking
scoundrels (I do no wrong to our own countrymen in
styling them so, for not one in twenty was a genuine
American), purporting to belong to our mercantile
marine, and chiefly composed of Liverpool
Black-ballers and the scum of every maritime nation on
earth; such being the seamen by whoseassistance we then disputed the
navigation of the world with England. These specimens
of a most unfortunate class of people were shipwrecked
crews in quest of bed, board, and clothing; invalids
asking permits for the hospital; bruised and bloody
wretches complaining of ill-treatment by their
officers; drunkards, desperadoes, vagabonds, and
cheats, perplexingly intermingled with an uncertain
proportion of reasonably honest men. All of them (save
here and there a poor devil of a kidnapped landsman in
his shore-going rags) wore red flannel shirts, in
which they had sweltered or shivered throughout the
voyage, and all required consular assistance in one
form or another.

Any respectable visitor, if he could make up his
mind to elbow a passage among these sea-monsters, was
admitted into an outer office, where he found more of
the same species, explaining their respective wants or
grievances to the Vice-Consul and clerks, while their
shipmates awaited their turn outside the door.
Passing through this exterior court, the stranger was
ushered into an inner privacy, where sat the Consul
himself, ready to give personal attention to such
peculiarly difficult and more important cases as might
demand the exercise of (what we will courteously
suppose to be) his own higher judicial or
administrative sagacity.

It was an apartment of very moderate size, painted
m imitation of oak, and duskily lighted by two windows
looking across a by-street at the rough brick-side of
an immense cotton warehouse, a plainer and uglier
structure than ever was built in America. On the walls
of the room hung a large map of the United States (as
they were, twenty years ago, but seem little likely to
be, twenty years hence), and a similar one ofGreat Britain, with its
territory so provokingly compact, that we may expect
it to sink sooner than sunder. Farther adornments
were some rude engravings of our naval victories in
the War of 1812, together with the Tennessee State
House, and a Hudson River steamer, and a colored,
life-size lithograph of General Taylor, with an honest
hideousness of aspect, occupying the place of honor
above the mantel-piece. On the top of a bookcase stood
a fierce and terrible bust of General Jackson,
pilloried in a military collar which rose above his
ears, and frowning forth immitigably at any Englishman
who might happen to cross the threshold. I am afraid,
however, that the truculence of the old General's
expression was utterly thrown away on this stolid and
obdurate race of men; for, when they occasionally
inquired whom this work of art represented, I was
mortified to find that the younger ones had never
heard of the battle of New Orleans, and that their
elders had either forgotten it altogether, or
contrived to misremember, and twist it wrong end
foremost into something like an English victory. They
have caught from the old Romans (whom they resemble in
so many other characteristics) this excellent method
of keeping the national glory intact by sweeping all
defeats and humiliations clean out of their memory.
Nevertheless, my patriotism forbade me to take down
either the bust or the pictures, both because it
seemed no more than right that an American Consulate
(being a little patch of our nationality imbedded into
the soil and institutions of England) should fairly
represent the American taste in the fine arts, and
because these decorations reminded me so delightfully
of an old-fashioned American barber's shop.

One truly English object was a barometer hangingon the wall, generally
indicating one or another degree of disagreeable
weather, and so seldom pointing to Fair, that I began
to consider that portion of its circle as made
superfluously. The deep chimney, with its grate of
bituminous coal, was English too, as was also the
chill temperature that sometimes called for a fire at
midsummer, and the foggy or smoky atmosphere which
often, between November and March, compelled me to set
the gas aflame at noonday. I am not aware of omitting
anything important in the above descriptive inventory,
unless it be some book-shelves filled with octavo
volumes of the American Statutes, and a good many
pigeon-holes stuffed with dusty communications from
former Secretaries of State, and other official
documents of similar value, constituting part of the
archives of the Consulate, which I might have done my
successor a favor by flinging into the coal-grate.
Yes; there was one other article demanding prominent
notice: the consular copy of the New Testament, bound
in black morocco, and greasy, I fear, with a daily
succession of perjured kisses; at least, I can hardly
hope that all the ten thousand oaths, administered by
me between two breaths, to all sorts of people and on
all manner worldly business, were reckoned by the
swearer as if taken at his soul's peril.

Such, in short, was the dusky and stifled chamber
in which I spent wearily a considerable portion of
more than four good years of my existence. At first,
to be quite frank with the reader, I looked upon it as
not altogether fit to be tenanted by the commercial
representative of so great and prosperous a country as
the United States then were; and I should speedily
have transferred my headquarters to airier and loftier
apartments, except for the prudent consideration
thatmy government
would have left me thus to support its dignity at my
own personal expense. Besides, a long line of
distinguished predecessors, of whom the latest is now
a gallant general under the Union banner, had found
the locality good enough for them; it might certainly
be tolerated, therefore, by an individual so little
ambitious of external magnificence as myself. So I
settled quietly down, striking some of my roots into
such soil as I could find, adapting myself to
circumstances, and with so much success, that, though
from first to last I hated the very sight of the
little room, I should yet have felt a singular kind of
reluctance in changing it for a better.

Hither, in the course of my incumbency, came a
great variety of visitors, principally Americans, but
including almost every other nationality on earth,
especially the distressed and downfallen ones, like
those of Poland and Hungary. Italian bandits (for so
they looked), proscribed conspirators from Spain,
Spanish-Americans, Cubans who professed to have stood
by Lopez, and narrowly escaped his fate, scarred
French soldiers of the Second Republic,--in a word,
all sufferers, or pretended ones, in the cause of
Liberty, all people homeless in the widest sense,
those who never had a country, or had lost it, those
whom their native land had impatiently flung off for
planning a better system of things than they were born
to,--a multitude of these, and, doubtless, an equal
number of jail-birds, outwardly of the same feather,
sought the American Consulate, in hopes of at least a
bit of bread, and, perhaps, to beg a passage to the
blessed shores of Freedom. In most cases there was
nothing, and in any case distressingly little, to be
done for them; neither was I of a proselyting
disposition, nor desired to makemy Consulate a nucleus for the
vagrant discontents of other lands. And yet it was a
proud thought, a forcible appeal to the sympathies of
an American, that these unfortunates claimed the
privileges of citizenship in our Republic on the
strength of the very same noble misdemeanors that had
rendered them outlaws to their native despotisms. So I
gave them what small help I could. Methinks the true
patriots and martyr-spirits of the whole world should
have been conscious of a pang near the heart, when a
deadly blow was aimed at the vitality of a country
which they have felt to be their own in the last
resort.

As for my countrymen, I grew better acquainted with
many of our national characteristics during those four
years than in all my preceding life. Whether brought
more strikingly out by the contrast with English
manners, or that my Yankee friends assumed an extra
peculiarity from a sense of defiant patriotism, so it
was that their tones, sentiments, and behavior, even
their figures and cast of countenance, all seemed
chiselled in sharper angles than ever I had imagined
them to be at home. It impressed me with an odd idea
of having somehow lost the property of my own person,
when I occasionally heard one them speaking of me as
"my Consul"! They often came to the
Consulate in parties of half a dozen or more, on no
business whatever, but merely to subject their public
servant to a rigid examination, and see how he was
getting on with his duties. These interviews were
rather formidable, being characterized by a certain
stiffness which I felt to be sufficiently irksome at
the moment, though it looks laughable enough in the
retrospect. It is my firm belief that these
fellow-citizens, possessing a native tendency to
organization, generally halted outsideof the door, to elect a speaker,
chairman, or moderator, and thus approached me with
all the formalities of a deputation from the American
people. After salutations on both sides,--abrupt,
awful, and severe on their part, and deprecatory on
mine,--and the national ceremony of shaking hands
being duly gone through with, the interview proceeded
by a series of calm and well-considered questions or
remarks from the spokesman (no other of the guests
vouchsafing to utter a word), and diplomatic responses
from the Consul, who sometimes found the investigation
a little more searching than he liked. I flatter
myself, however, that, by much practice, I attained
considerable skill in this kind of intercourse, the
art of which lies in passing off commonplaces for new
and valuable truths, and talking trash and emptiness
in such a way that a pretty acute auditor might
mistake it for something solid. If there be any better
method of dealing with such junctures, --when talk is
to be created out of nothing, and within the scope of
several minds at once, so that you cannot apply
yourself to your interlocutor's individuality,--I
have not learned it.

Sitting, as it were, in the gateway between the Old
World and the New, where the steamers and packets
landed the greater part of our wandering countrymen,
and received them again when their wanderings were
done, I saw that no people on earth have such vagabond
habits as ourselves. The Continental races never
travel at all if they can help it; nor does an
Englishman ever think of stirring abroad, unless he
has the money to spare, or proposes to himself some
definite advantage from the journey; but it seemed to
me that nothing was more common than for a young
American deliberately to spend all his resources in an
æstheticperegrination about Europe,
returning with pockets nearly empty to begin the world
in earnest. It happened, indeed, much oftener than was
at all agreeable to myself, that their funds held out
just long enough to bring them to the door of my
Consulate, where they entered as if with an undeniable
right to its shelter and protection, and required at
my hands to be sent home again. In my first
simplicity,--finding them gentlemanly in manners,
passably educated, and only tempted a little beyond
their means by a laudable desire of improving and
refining themselves, or perhaps for the sake of
getting better artistic instruction in music,
painting, or sculpture than our country could
supply,--I sometimes took charge of them on my private
responsibility, since our government gives itself no
trouble about its stray children, except the
sea-faring class. But, after a few such experiments,
discovering that none of these estimable and ingenuous
young men, however trustworthy they might appear, ever
dreamed of reimbursing the Consul, I deemed it
expedient to take another course with them. Applying
myself to some friendly shipmaster, I engaged homeward
passages on their behalf, with the understanding that
they were to make themselves serviceable on shipboard;
and I remember several very pathetic appeals from
painters and musicians, touching the damage which
their artistic fingers were likely to incur from
handling the ropes. But my observation of so many
heavier troubles left me very little tenderness for
their finger-ends. In time I grew to be reasonably
hard-hearted, though it never was quite possible to
leave a countryman with no shelter save an English
poorhouse, when, as he invariably averred, he had only
to set foot on his native soil to be possessed of
ample funds. It was myultimate conclusion, however, that
American ingenuity may be pretty safely left to
itself, and that, one way or another, a Yankee
vagabond is certain to turn up at his own threshold,
if he has any, without help of a Consul, and perhaps
be taught a lesson of foresight that may profit him
hereafter.

Among these stray Americans, I met with no other
case so remarkable as that of an old man, who was in
the habit of visiting me once in a few months, and
soberly affirmed that he had been wandering about
England more than a quarter of a century (precisely
twenty-seven years, I think), and all the while doing
his utmost to get home again. Herman Melville, in his
excellent novel or biography of "Israel
Potter," has an idea somewhat similar to this.
The individual now in question was a mild and patient,
but very ragged and pitiable old fellow, shabby beyond
description, lean and hungry-looking, but with a large
and somewhat red nose. He made no complaint of his
ill-fortune, but only repeated in a quiet voice, with
a pathos of which he was himself evidently
unconscious, "I want to get home to Ninety-Second
Street, Philadelphia." He described himself as a
printer by trade, said that he had come over when he
was a younger man, in the hope of bettering himself,
and for the sake of seeing the Old Country, but had
never since been rich enough to pay his homeward
passage. His manner and accent did not quite convince
me that he was an American, and I told him so; but he
steadfastly affirmed, "Sir, I was born and have lived
in Ninety-Second Street, Philadelphia," and then
went on to describe some public edifices and other
local objects with which he used to be familiar,
adding, with a simplicity that touched me very
closely, "Sir, I hadrather be there than here!"
Though I still manifested a lingering doubt, he took
no offence, replying with the same mild depression as
at first, and insisting again and again on
Ninety-Second Street. Up to the time when I saw him,
he still got a little occasional job-work at his
trade, but subsisted mainly on such charity as he met
with in his wanderings, shifting from place to place
continually, and asking assistance to convey him to
his native land. Possibly he was an impostor, one of
the multitudinous shapes of English vagabondism, and
told his falsehood with such powerful simplicity,
because, by many repetitions, he had convinced himself
of its truth. But if, as I believe, the tale was fact,
how very strange and sad was this old man's fate!
Homeless on a foreign shore, looking always towards
his country, coming again and again to the point
whence so many were setting sail for it,--so many who
would soon tread in Ninety-Second Street,--losing, in
this long series of years, some of the distinctive
characteristics of an American, and at last dying and
surrendering his clay to be a portion of the soil
whence he could not escape in his lifetime.

He appeared to see that he had moved me, but did
not attempt to press his advantage with any new
argument, or any varied form of entreaty. He had but
scanty and scattered thoughts in his gray head, and in
the intervals of those, like the refrain of an old
ballad, came in the monotonous burden of his appeal,
"If I could only find myself in Ninety-Second
Street, Philadelphia!" But even his desire of
getting home had ceased to be an ardent one (if,
indeed, it had not always partaken of the dreamy
sluggishness of his character), although it remained
his only locomotive impulse, and perhaps the sole
principle of life that kept his blood from actual
torpor.

The poor old fellow's story seemed to me
almost as worthy of being chanted in immortal song as
that of Odysseus or Evangeline. I took his case into
deep consideration, but dared not incur the moral
responsibility of sending him across the sea, at his
age, after so many years of exile, when the very
tradition of him had passed away, to find his friends
dead, or forgetful, or irretrievably vanished, and the
whole country become more truly a foreign land to him
than England was now,--and even Ninety-Second Street,
in the weedlike decay and growth of our localities,
made over anew and grown unrecognizable by his old
eyes. That street, so patiently longed for, had
transferred itself to the New Jerusalem, and he must
seek it there, contenting his slow heart, meanwhile,
with the smoke-begrimed thoroughfares of English
towns, or the green country lanes and by-paths with
which his wanderings had made him familiar; for
doubtless he had a beaten track, and was the
"long-remembered beggar" now, with food and
a roughly hospitable greeting ready for him at many a
farm-house door, and his choice of lodging under a
score of haystacks. In America, nothing awaited him
but that worst form of disappointment which comes
under the guise of a long-cherished and
late-accomplished purpose, and then a year or two of
dry and barren sojourn in an almshouse, and death
among strangers at last, where he had imagined a
circle of familiar faces. So I contented myself with
giving him alms, which he thankfully accepted, and
went away with bent shoulders and an aspect of gentle
forlornness; returning upon his orbit, however, after
a few months, to tell the same sad and quiet story of
his abode in England for more than twenty-seven years,
in all which time he hadbeen endeavoring, and still
endeavored as patiently as ever, to find his way home
to Ninety-Second Street, Philadelphia.

I recollect another case, of a more ridiculous
order, but still with a foolish kind of pathos
entangled in it, which impresses me now more forcibly
than it did at the moment. One day, a queer, stupid,
good-natured, fat-faced individual came into my
private room, dressed in a sky-blue, cut-away coat and
mixed trousers, both garments worn and shabby, and
rather too small for his overgrown bulk. After a
little preliminary talk, he turned out to be a country
shopkeeper (from Connecticut, I think), who had left a
flourishing business, and come over to England
purposely and solely to have an interview with the
Queen. Some years before he had named his children,
one for her Majesty and the other for Prince Albert,
and had transmitted photographs of the little people,
as well as of his wife and himself, to the illustrious
godmother. The Queen had gratefully acknowledged the
favor in a letter under the hand of her private
secretary. Now, the shopkeeper, like a great many
other Americans, had long cherished a fantastic notion
that he was one of the rightful heirs of a rich
English estate; and on the strength of her
Majesty's letter and the hopes of royal patronage
which it inspired, he had shut up his little
country-store and come over to claim his inheritance.
On the voyage, a German fellow-passenger had relieved
him of his money on pretence of getting it favorably
exchanged, and had disappeared immediately on the
ship's arrival; so that the poor fellow was compelled
to pawn all his clothes, except the remarkably shabby
ones in which I beheld him, and in which (as he
himself hinted, with a melancholy, yetgood-natured smile) he did not look
altogether fit to see the Queen. I agreed with him
that the bobtailed coat and mixed trousers constituted
a very odd-looking court-dress, and suggested that it
was doubtless his present purpose to get back to
Connecticut as fast as possible. But no! The resolve
to see the Queen was as strong in him as ever; and it
was marvellous the pertinacity with which he clung to
it amid raggedness and starvation, and the earnestness
of his supplication that I would supply him with funds
for a suitable appearance at Windsor Castle.

I never had so satisfactory a perception of a
complete booby before in my life; and it caused me to
feel kindly towards him, and yet impatient and
exasperated on behalf of common-sense, which could not
possibly tolerate that such an unimaginable donkey
should exist. I laid his absurdity before him in the
very plainest terms, but without either exciting his
anger or shaking his resolution. "Oh my dear
man," quoth he, with good-natured, placid,
simple, and tearful stubbornness, "if you could but
enter into my feelings and see the matter from
beginning to end as I see it!" To confess the
truth, I have since felt that I was hard-hearted to
the poor simpleton, and that there was more weight in
his remonstrance than I chose to be sensible of, at
the time; for, like many men who have been in the
habit of making playthings or tools of their
imagination and sensibility, I was too rigidly
tenacious of what was reasonable in the affairs of
real life. And even absurdity has its rights, when, as
in this case, it has absorbed a human being's
entire nature and purposes. I ought to have
transmitted him to Mr. Buchanan, in London, who, being
a good-natured old gentleman, and anxious, just then,
to gratifythe
universal Yankee nation, might, for the joke's
sake, have got him admittance to the Queen, who had
fairly laid herself open to his visit, and has
received hundreds of our countrymen on infinitely
slighter grounds. But I was inexorable, being turned
to flint by the insufferable proximity of a fool, and
refused to interfere with his business in any way
except to procure him a passage home. I can see his
face of mild, ridiculous despair at this moment, and
appreciate, better than I could then, how awfully
cruel he must have felt my obduracy to be. For years
and years, the idea of an interview with Queen
Victoria had haunted his poor foolish mind; and now,
when he really stood on English ground, and the
palace-door was hanging ajar for him, he was expected
to turn back, a penniless and bamboozled simpleton,
merely because an iron-hearted Consul refused to lend
him thirty shillings (so low had his demand ultimately
sunk) to buy a second-class ticket on the rail for
London!

He visited the Consulate several times afterwards,
subsisting on a pittance that I allowed him in the
hope of gradually starving him back to Connecticut,
assailing me with the old petition at every
opportunity, looking shabbier at every visit, but
still thoroughly good-tempered, mildly stubborn, and
smiling through his tears, not without a perception of
the ludicrousness of his own position. Finally, he
disappeared altogether, and whither he had wandered,
and whether he ever saw the Queen, or wasted quite
away in the endeavor, I never knew; but I remember
unfolding the "Times," about that period,
with a daily dread of reading an account of a ragged
Yankee's attempt to steal into Buckingham Palace, and
how he smiled tearfully at his captors, and besought
them to introduce him to herMajesty. I submit to Mr. Secretary
Seward that he ought to make diplomatic remonstrances
to the British Ministry, and require them to take such
order that the Queen shall not any longer bewilder the
wits of our poor compatriots by responding to their
epistles and thanking them for their photographs.

One circumstance in the foregoing incident--I mean
the unhappy storekeeper's notion of establishing
his claim to an English estate--was common to a great
many other applications, personal or by letter, with
which I was favored by my countrymen. The cause of
this peculiar insanity lies deep in the Anglo-American
heart. After all these bloody wars and vindictive
animosities, we have still an unspeakable yearning
towards England. When our forefathers left the old
home, they pulled up many of their roots, but trailed
along with them others, which were never snapt asunder
by the tug of such a lengthening distance, nor have
been torn out of the original soil by the violence of
subsequent struggles, nor severed by the edge of the
sword. Even so late as these days, they remain
entangled with our heart-strings, and might often have
influenced our national cause like the tiller-ropes of
a ship, if the rough gripe of England had been capable
of managing so sensitive a kind of machinery. It has
required nothing less than the boorishness, the
stolidity, the self-sufficiency, the contemptuous
jealousy, the half-sagacity, invariably blind of one
eye and often distorted of the other, that
characterize this strange people, to compel us to be a
great nation in our own right, instead of continuing
virtually, if not in name, a province of their small
island. What pains did they take to shake us off, and
have ever since taken to keep us wide apart from
them!It might seem
their folly, but was really their fate, or, rather,
the Providence of God, who has doubtless a work for us
to do, in which the massive materiality of the English
character would have been too ponderous a dead-weight
upon our progress. And, besides, if England had been
wise enough to twine our new vigor round about her
ancient strength, her power would have been too firmly
established ever to yield, in its due season, to the
otherwise immutable law of imperial vicissitude. The
earth might then have beheld the intolerable spectacle
of a sovereignty and institutions, imperfect, but
indestructible.

Nationally, there has ceased to be any peril of so
inauspicious and yet outwardly attractive an
amalgamation. But as an individual, the American is
often conscious of the deep-rooted sympathies that
belong more fitly to times gone by, and feels a blind
pathetic tendency to wander back again, which makes
itself evident in such wild dreams as I have alluded
to above, about English inheritances. A mere
coincidence of names (the Yankee one, perhaps, having
been assumed by legislative permission), a
supposititious pedigree, a silver mug on which an
anciently engraved coat of arms has been half scrubbed
out, a seal with an uncertain crest, an old yellow
letter or document in faded ink, the more scantily
legible the better,--rubbish of this kind, found in a
neglected drawer, has been potent enough to turn the
brain of many an honest Republican, especially if
assisted by an advertisement for lost heirs, cut out
of a British newspaper. There is no estimating or
believing, till we come into a position to know it,
what foolery lurks latent in the breasts of very
sensible people. Remembering such sober extravagances,
I should not beat all
surprised to find that I am myself guilty of some
unsuspected absurdity, that may appear to me the most
substantial trait in my character.

I might fill many pages with instances of this
diseased American appetite for English soil. A
respectable-looking-woman, well advanced in life, of
sour aspect, exceedingly homely, but decidedly
New-Englandish in figure and manners, came to my
office with a great bundle of documents, at the very
first glimpse of which I apprehended something
terrible. Nor was I mistaken. The bundle contained
evidences of her indubitable claim to the site on
which Castle Street, the Town Hall, the Exchange, and
all the principal business part of Liverpool have long
been situated; and, with considerable peremptoriness,
the good lady signified her expectation that I should
take charge of her suit, and prosecute it to judgment;
not, however, on the equitable condition of receiving
half the value of the property recovered (which, in
case of complete success, would have made both of us
ten or twenty fold millionnaires), but without
recompense or reimbursement of legal expenses, solely
as an incident of my official duty. Another time came
two ladies, bearing a letter of emphatic introduction
from his Excellency the Governor of their native
State, who testified in most satisfactory terms to
their social respectability. They were claimants of a
great estate in Cheshire, and announced themselves as
blood-relatives of Queen Victoria,--a point, however,
which they deemed it expedient to keep in the
background until their territorial rights should be
established, apprehending that the Lord High
Chancellor might otherwise be less likely to come to a
fair decision in respect to them, from a probable
disinclination to admit new members into theroyal kin. Upon my
honor, I imagine that they had an eye to the
possibility of the eventual succession of one or both
of them to the crown of Great Britain through
superiority of title over the Brunswick line;
although, being maiden ladies, like their predecessor
Elizabeth, they could hardly have hoped to establish a
lasting dynasty upon the throne. It proves, I trust, a
certain disinterestedness on my part, that,
encountering them thus in the dawn of their fortunes,
I forbore to put in a plea for a future dukedom.

Another visitor of the same class was a gentleman
of refined manners, handsome figure, and remarkably
intellectual aspect. Like many men of an adventurous
cast, he had so quiet a deportment, and such an
apparent disinclination to general sociability, that
you would have fancied him moving always along some
peaceful and secluded walk of life. Yet, literally
from his first hour, he had been tossed upon the
surges of a most varied and tumultuous existence,
having been born at sea, of American parentage, but on
board of a Spanish vessel, and spending many of the
subsequent years in voyages, travels, and outlandish
incidents and vicissitudes, which, methought, had
hardly been paralleled since the days of Gulliver or
De Foe. When his dignified reserve was overcome, he
had the faculty of narrating these adventures with
wonderful eloquence, working up his descriptive
sketches with such intuitive perception of the
picturesque points that the whole was thrown forward
with a positively illusive effect, like matters of
your own visual experience. In fact, they were so
admirably done that I could never more than half
believe them, because the genuine affairs of life are
not apt to transact themselves so artistically. Many
of his scenes were laid in the East, andamong those seldom-visited
archipelagoes of the Indian Ocean, so that there was
an Oriental fragrance breathing through his talk, and
an odor of the Spice Islands still lingering in his
garments. He had much to say of the delightful
qualities of the Malay pirates, who, indeed, carry on
a predatory warfare against the ships of all civilized
nations, and cut every Christian throat among their
prisoners; but (except for deeds of that character,
which are the rule and habit of their life, and matter
of religion and conscience with them) they are a
gentle-natured people, of primitive innocence and
integrity.

But his best story was about a race of men (if men
they were) who seemed so fully to realize Swift's
wicked fable of the Yahoos, that my friend was much
exercised with psychological speculations whether or
no they had any souls. They dwelt in the wilds of
Ceylon, like other savage beasts, hairy, and spotted
with tufts of fur, filthy, shameless, weaponless
(though warlike in their individual bent), tool-less,
houseless, language-less, except for a few guttural
sounds, hideously dissonant, whereby they held some
rudest kind of communication among themselves. They
lacked both memory and foresight, and were wholly
destitute of government, social institutions, or law
or rulership of any description, except the immediate
tyranny of the strongest; radically untamable,
moreover, save that the people of the country managed
to subject a few of the less ferocious and stupid ones
to outdoor servitude among their other cattle. They
were beastly in almost all their attributes, and that
to such a degree that the observer, losing sight of
any link betwixt them and manhood, could generally
witness their brutalities without greater horror than
at thoseof some
disagreeable quadruped in a menagerie. And yet, at
times, comparing what were the lowest general traits
in his own race with what was highest in these
abominable monsters, he found a ghastly similitude
that half compelled him to recognize them as human
brethren.

After these Gulliverian researches, my agreeable
acquaintance had fallen under the ban of the Dutch
government, and had suffered (this, at least, being
matter of fact) nearly two years' imprisonment,
with confiscation of a large amount of property, for
which Mr. Belmont, our minister at the Hague, had just
made a peremptory demand of reimbursement and damages.
Meanwhile, since arriving in England on his way to the
United States, he had been providentially led to
inquire into the circumstances of his birth on
shipboard, and had discovered that not himself alone,
but another baby, had come into the world during the
same voyage of the prolific vessel, and that there
were almost irrefragable reasons for believing that
these two children had been assigned to the wrong
mothers. Many reminiscences of his early days
confirmed him in the idea that his nominal parents
were aware of the exchange. The family to which he
felt authorized to attribute his lineage was that of a
nobleman, in the picture-gallery of whose country-seat
(whence, if I mistake not, our adventurous friend had
just returned) he had discovered a portrait bearing a
striking resemblance to himself. As soon as he should
have reported the outrageous action of the Dutch
government to President Pierce and the Secretary of
State, and recovered the confiscated property, he
purposed to return to England and establish his claim
to the nobleman's title and estate.

I had accepted his Oriental fantasies (which,
indeed, to do him justice, have been recorded by
scientific societies among the genuine phenomena of
natural history), not as matters of indubitable
credence, but as allowable specimens of an imaginative
traveller's vivid coloring and rich embroidery on the
coarse texture and dull neutral tints of truth. The
English romance was among the latest communications
that he intrusted to my private ear; and as soon as I
heard the first chapter,--so wonderfully akin to what
I might have wrought out of my own head, not
unpractised in such figments,--I began to repent
having made myself responsible for the future
nobleman's passage homeward in the next Collins
steamer. Nevertheless, should his English rent-roll
fall a little behindhand, his Dutch claim for a
hundred thousand dollars was certainly in the hands of
our government, and might at least be valuable to the
extent of thirty pounds, which I had engaged to pay on
his behalf. But I have reason to fear that his Dutch
riches turned out to be Dutch gilt or fairy gold, and
his English country-seat a mere castle in the
air,--which I exceedingly regret, for he was a
delightful companion and a very gentlemanly man.

A Consul, in his position of universal
responsibility, the general adviser and helper,
sometimes finds himself compelled to assume the
guardianship of personages who, in their own sphere,
are supposed capable of superintending the highest
interests of whole communities. An elderly Irishman, a
naturalized citizen, once put the desire and
expectation of all our penniless vagabonds into a very
suitable phrase, by pathetically entreating me to be a
"father to him"; and, simple as I sit scribbling here,
I have acted a father'spart, not only by scores of such
unthrifty old children as himself, but by a progeny of
far loftier pretensions. It may be well for persons
who are conscious of any radical weakness in their
character, any besetting sin, any unlawful propensity,
any unhallowed impulse, which (while surrounded with
the manifold restraints that protect a man from that
treacherous and lifelong enemy, his lower self, in the
circle of society where he is at home) they may have
succeeded in keeping under the lock and key of
strictest propriety,--it may be well for them, before
seeking the perilous freedom of a distant land,
released from the watchful eyes of neighborhoods and
coteries, lightened of that wearisome burden, an
immaculate name, and blissfully obscure after years of
local prominence,--it may be well for such individuals
to know that when they set foot on a foreign shore,
the long-imprisoned Evil, scenting a wild license in
the unaccustomed atmosphere, is apt to grow riotous in
its iron cage. It rattles the rusty barriers with
gigantic turbulence, and if there be an infirm joint
anywhere in the framework, it breaks madly forth,
compressing the mischief of a life-time into a little
space.

A parcel of letters had been accumulating at the
Consulate for two or three weeks, directed to a
certain Doctor of Divinity, who had left America by a
sailing-packet and was still upon the sea. In due
time, the vessel arrived, and the reverend Doctor paid
me a visit. He was a fine-looking middle-aged
gentleman, a perfect model of clerical propriety,
scholar-like, yet with the air of a man of the world
rather than a student, though overspread with the
graceful sanctity of a popular metropolitan divine, a
part of whose duty it might be to exemplify the
natural accordance betweenChristianity and good-breeding. He
seemed a little excited, as an American is apt to be
on first arriving in England, but conversed with
intelligence as well as animation, making himself so
agreeable that his visit stood out in considerable
relief from the monotony of my daily commonplace. As I
learned from authentic sources, he was somewhat
distinguished in his own region for fervor and
eloquence in the pulpit, but was now compelled to
relinquish it temporarily for the purpose of
renovating his impaired health by an extensive tour in
Europe. Promising to dine with me, he took up his
bundle of letters and went away.

The Doctor, however, failed to make his appearance
at dinner-time, or to apologize the next day for his
absence; and in the course of a day or two more, I
forgot all about him, concluding that he must have set
forth on his Continental travels, the plan of which he
had sketched out at our interview. But, by and by, I
received a call from the master of the vessel in which
he had arrived. He was in some alarm about his
passenger, whose luggage remained on shipboard, but of
whom nothing had been heard or seen since the moment
of his departure from the Consulate. We conferred
together, the captain and I, about the expediency of
setting the police on the traces (if any were to be
found) of our vanished friend; but it struck me that
the good captain was singularly reticent, and that
there was something a little mysterious in a few
points that he hinted at rather than expressed; so
that, scrutinizing the affair carefully, I surmised
that the intimacy of life on shipboard might have
taught him more about the reverend gentleman than, for
some reason or other, he deemed it prudent to reveal.
At home, in our native country, I would have looked to
theDoctor's personal
safety and left his reputation to take care of itself,
knowing that the good fame of a thousand saintly
clergymen would amply dazzle out any lamentable spot
on a single brother's character. But in scornful
and invidious England, on the idea that the credit of
the sacred office was measurably intrusted to my
discretion, I could not endure, for the sake of
American Doctors of Divinity generally, that this
particular Doctor should cut an ignoble figure in the
police reports of the English newspapers, except at
the last necessity. The clerical body, I flatter
myself, will acknowledge that I acted on their own
principle. Besides, it was now too late; the mischief
and violence, if any had been impending, were not of a
kind which it requires the better part of a week to
perpetrate; and to sum up the entire matter, I felt
certain, from a good deal of somewhat similar
experience, that, if the missing Doctor still breathed
this vital air, he would turn up at the Consulate as
soon as his money should be stolen or spent.

Precisely a week after this reverend person's
disappearance, there came to my office a tall,
middle-aged gentleman in a blue military surtout,
braided at the seams, but out at elbows, and as shabby
as if the wearer had been bivouacking in it throughout
a Crimean campaign. It was buttoned up to the very
chin, except where three or four of the buttons were
lost; nor was there any glimpse of a white
shirt-collar illuminating the rusty black cravat. A
grisly mustache was just beginning to roughen the
stranger's upper lip. He looked disreputable to
the last degree, but still had a ruined air of good
society glimmering about him, like a few specks of
polish on a sword-blade that has lain corroding in a
mud-puddle. I took him to besome American marine officer, of
dissipated habits, or perhaps a cashiered British
major, stumbling into the wrong quarters through the
unrectified bewilderment of the last night's
debauch. He greeted me, however, with polite
familiarity, as though we had been previously
acquainted; whereupon I drew coldly back (as sensible
people naturally do, whether from strangers or former
friends, when too evidently at odds with fortune) and
requested to know who my visitor might be, and what
was his business at the Consulate. "Am I then so
changed?" he exclaimed with a vast depth of
tragic intonation; and after a little blind and
bewildered talk, behold! the truth flashed upon me. It
was the Doctor of Divinity? If I had meditated a scene
or a coup de theâtre, I could not
have contrived a more effectual one than by this
simple and genuine difficulty of recognition. The poor
Divine must have felt that he had lost his personal
identity through the misadventures of one little week.
And, to say the truth, he did look as if, like Job, on
account of his especial sanctity, he had been
delivered over to the direst temptations of Satan, and
proving weaker than the man of Uz, the Arch Enemy had
been empowered to drag him through Tophet,
transforming him, in the process, from the most
decorous clergyman into the rowdiest and dirtiest of
disbanded officers. I never fathomed the mystery of
his military costume, but conjectured that a lurking
sense of fitness had induced him to exchange his
clerical garments for this habit of a sinner; nor can
I tell precisely into what pitfall, not more of vice
than terrible calamity, he had precipitated
himself,--being more than satisfied to know that the
outcasts of society can sink no lower than this poor,
desecrated wretch had sunk.

The opportunity, I presume, does not often happen
to a layman, of administering moral and religious
reproof to a Doctor of Divinity; but finding the
occasion thrust upon me, and the hereditary Puritan
waxing strong in my breast, I deemed it a matter of
conscience not to let it pass entirely unimproved. The
truth is, I was unspeakably shocked and disgusted.
Not, however, that I was then to learn that clergymen
are made of the same flesh and blood as other people,
and perhaps lack one small safeguard which the rest of
us possess, because they are aware of their own
peccability, and therefore cannot look up to the
clerical class for the proof of the possibility of a
pure life on earth, with such reverential confidence
as we are prone to do. But I remembered the innocent
faith of my boyhood, and the good old silver-headed
clergyman, who seemed to me as much a saint then on
earth as he is now in heaven, and partly for whose
sake, though all these darkening years, I retain a
devout, though not intact nor unwavering respect for
the entire fraternity. What a hideous wrong,
therefore, had the backslider inflicted on his
brethren, and still more on me, who much needed
whatever fragments of broken reverence (broken, not as
concerned religion, but its earthly institutions and
professors) it might yet be possible to patch into a
sacred image! Should all pulpits and communion-tables
have thenceforth a stain upon them, and the guilty one
go unrebuked for it? So I spoke to the unhappy man as
I never thought myself warranted in speaking to any
other mortal, hitting him hard, doing my utmost to
find out his vulnerable part, and prick him into the
depths of it. And not without more effect than I had
dreamed of, or desired!

No doubt, the novelty of the Doctor's reversed
position, thus standing up to receive such a
fulmination as the clergy have heretofore arrogated
the exclusive right of inflicting, might give
additional weight and sting to the words which I found
utterance for. But there was another reason (which,
had I in the least suspected it, would have closed my
lips at once) for his feeling morbidly sensitive to
the cruel rebuke that I administered. The unfortunate
man had come to me, laboring under one of the
consequences of his riotous outbreak, in the shape of
delirium tremens; he bore a hell within the compass of
his own breast, all the torments of which blazed up
with tenfold inveteracy when I thus took upon myself
the Devil's office of stirring up the red-hot
embers. His emotions, as well as the external movement
and expression of them by voice, countenance, and
gesture, were terribly exaggerated by the tremendous
vibration of nerves resulting from the disease. It was
the deepest tragedy I ever witnessed. I know
sufficiently, from that one experience, how a
condemned soul would manifest its agonies; and for the
future, if I have anything to do with sinners, I mean
to operate upon them through sympathy and not rebuke.
What had I to do with rebuking him? The disease, long
latent in his, heart, had shown itself in a frightful
eruption on the surface of his life. That was all! Is
it a thing to scold the sufferer for?

To conclude this wretched story, the poor Doctor of
Divinity, having been robbed of all his money in this
little airing beyond the limits of propriety, was
easily persuaded to give up the intended tour and
return to his bereaved flock, who, very probably, were
thereafter conscious of an increased unction in his
soul-stirring eloquence, without suspecting the awful
depths intowhich
their pastor had dived in quest of it. His voice is
now silent. I leave it to members of his own
profession to decide whether it was better for him
thus to sin outright, and so to be let into the
miserable secret what manner of man he was, or to have
gone through life outwardly unspotted, making the
first discovery of his latent evil at the
judgment-seat. It has occurred to me that his dire
calamity, as both he and I regarded it, might have
been the only method by which precisely such a man as
himself, and so situated, could be redeemed. He has
learned, ere now, how that matter stood.

For a man, with a natural tendency to meddle with
other people's business, there could not possibly
be a more congenial sphere than the Liverpool
Consulate. For myself, I had never been in the habit
of feeling that I could sufficiently comprehend any
particular conjunction of circumstances with human
character, to justify me in thrusting in my awkward
agency among the intricate and unintelligible
machinery of Providence. I have always hated to give
advice, especially when there is a prospect of its
being taken. It is only one-eyed people who love to
advise, or have any spontaneous promptitude of action.
When a man opens both his eyes, he generally sees
about as many reasons for acting in any one way as in
any other, and quite as many for acting in neither;
and is therefore likely to leave his friends to
regulate their own conduct, and also to remain quiet
as regards his especial affairs till necessity shall
prick him onward. Nevertheless, the world and
individuals flourish upon a constant succession of
blunders. The secret of English practical success lies
in their characteristic faculty of shutting one eye,
whereby they get so distinct anddecided a view of what immediately
concerns them that they go stumbling towards it over a
hundred insurmountable obstacles, and achieve a
magnificent triumph without ever being aware of half
its difficulties. If General McClellan could but have
shut his left eye, the right one would long ago have
guided us into Richmond. Meanwhile, I have strayed far
away from the Consulate, where, as I was about to say,
I was compelled, in spite of my disinclination, to
impart both advice and assistance in multifarious
affairs that did not personally concern me, and
presume that I effected about as little mischief as
other men in similar contingencies. The duties of the
office carried me to prisons, police-courts,
hospitals, lunatic asylums, coroner's inquests,
death-beds, funerals, and brought me in contact with
insane people, criminals, ruined speculators, wild
adventurers, diplomatists, brother-consuls, and all
manner of simpletons and unfortunates, in greater
number and variety than I had ever dreamed of as
pertaining to America; in addition to whom there was
an equivalent multitude of English rogues, dexterously
counterfeiting the genuine Yankee article. It
required great discrimination not to be taken in by
these last-mentioned scoundrels; for they knew how to
imitate our national traits, had been at great pains
to instruct themselves as regarded American
localities, and were not readily to be caught by a
cross-examination as to the topographical features,
public institutions, or prominent inhabitants of the
places where they pretended to belong. The best
shibboleth I ever hit upon lay in the pronunciation of
the word "been" which the English invariably
make to rhyme with "green," and we
Northerners, at least (in accordance, I think, with
the custom of Shakespeare's time), universally
pronounce "bin."

All the matters that I have been treating of,
however, were merely incidental, and quite distinct
from the real business of the office. A great part of
the wear and tear of mind and temper resulted from the
bad relations between the seamen and officers of
American ships. Scarcely a morning passed, but that
some sailor came to show the marks of his ill-usage on
shipboard. Often, it was a whole crew of them, each
with his broken head or livid bruise, and all
testifying with one voice to a constant series of
savage outrages during the voyage; or, it might be,
they laid an accusation of actual murder, perpetrated
by the first or second officers, with many blows of
steel-knuckles, a rope's end, or a marline-spike,
or by the captain, in the twinkling of an eye, with a
shot of his pistol. Taking the seamen's view of
the case, you would suppose that the gibbet was hungry
for the murderers. Listening to the captain's
defence, you would seem to discover that he and his
officers were the humanest of mortals, but were driven
to a wholesome severity by the mutinous conduct of the
crew, who, moreover, had themselves slain their
comrade in the drunken riot and confusion of the first
day or two after they were shipped. Looked at
judicially, there appeared to be no right side to the
matter, nor any right side possible in so thoroughly
vicious a system as that of the American mercantile
marine. The Consul could do little, except to take
depositions, hold forth the greasy Testament to be
profaned anew with perjured kisses, and, in a few
instances of murder or manslaughter, carry the case
before an English magistrate, who generally decided
that the evidence was too contradictory to authorize
the transmission of the accused for trial in America.
The newspapers all over Englandcontained paragraphs, inveighing
against the cruelties of American shipmasters. The
British Parliament took up the matter (for nobody is
so humane as John Bull, when his benevolent
propensities are to be gratified by finding fault with
his neighbor), and caused Lord John Russell to
remonstrate with our government on the outrages for
which it was responsible before the world, and which
it failed to prevent or punish. The American Secretary
of State, old General Cass, responded, with perfectly
astounding ignorance of the subject, to the effect
that the statements of outrages had probably been
exaggerated, that the present laws of the United
States were quite adequate to deal with them, and that
the interference of the British Minister was uncalled
for.

The truth is, that the state of affairs was really
very horrible, and could be met by no laws at that
time (or I presume now) in existence. I once thought
of writing a pamphlet on the subject, but quitted the
Consulate before finding time to effect my purpose;
and all that phase of my life immediately assumed so
dream-like a consistency that I despaired of making it
seem solid or tangible to the public. And now it looks
distant and dim, like troubles of a century ago. The
origin of the evil lay in the character of the seamen,
scarcely any of whom were American, but the
off-scourings and refuse of all the seaports of the
world, such stuff as piracy is made of, together with
a considerable intermixture of returning emigrants,
and a sprinkling of absolutely kidnapped American
citizens. Even with such material the ships were very
inadequately manned. The shipmaster found himself upon
the deep, with a vast responsibility of property and
human life upon his hands, and no means ofsalvation except by
compelling his inefficient and demoralized crew to
heavier exertions than could reasonably be required of
the same number of able seamen. By law he had been
intrusted with no discretion of judicious punishment;
he therefore habitually left the whole matter of
discipline to his irresponsible mates, men often of
scarcely a superior quality to the crew. Hence ensued
a great mass of petty outrages, unjustifiable
assaults, shameful indignities, and nameless cruelty,
demoralizing alike to the perpetrators and the
sufferers; these enormities fell into the ocean
between the two countries, and could be punished in
neither. Many miserable stories come back upon my
memory as I write; wrongs that were immense, but for
which nobody could be held responsible, and which,
indeed, the closer you looked into them, the more they
lost the aspect of wilful misdoing, and assumed that
of an inevitable calamity. It was the fault of a
system, the misfortune of an individual. Be that as it
may, however, there will be no possibility of dealing
effectually with these troubles as long as we deem it
inconsistent with our national dignity or interests to
allow the English courts, under such restrictions as
may seem fit, a jurisdiction over offences perpetrated
on board our vessels in mid-ocean.

In such a life as this, the American shipmaster
develops himself into a man of iron energies,
dauntless courage, and inexhaustible resource, at the
expense, it must be acknowledged, of some of the
higher and gentler traits which might do him excellent
service in maintaining his authority. The class has
deteriorated of late years on account of the narrower
field of selection, owing chiefly to the diminution of
that excellent body of respectably educated New
England seamen,from
the flower of whom the officers used to be recruited.
Yet I found them, in many cases, very agreeable and
intelligent companions, with less nonsense about them
than landsmen usually have, eschewers of fine-spun
theories, delighting in square and tangible ideas, but
occasionally infested with prejudices that stuck to
their brains like barnacles to a ship's bottom. I
never could flatter myself that I was a general
favorite with them. One or two, perhaps, even now,
would scarcely meet me on amicable terms. Endowed
universally with a great pertinacity of will, they
especially disliked the interference of a consul with
their management on shipboard; notwithstanding which I
thrust in my very limited authority at every available
opening, and did the utmost that lay in my power,
though with lamentably small effect, towards enforcing
a better kind of discipline. They thought, no doubt
(and on plausible grounds enough, but scarcely
appreciating just that one little grain of hard New
England sense, oddly thrown in among the flimsier
composition of the Consul's character), that he,
a landsman, a bookman, and, as people said of him, a
fanciful recluse, could not possibly understand
anything of the difficulties or the necessities of a
shipmaster's position. But their cold regards were
rather acceptable than otherwise, for it is
exceedingly awkward to assume a judicial austerity in
the morning towards a man with whom you have been
hobnobbing over night.

With the technical details of the business of that
great Consulate (for great it then was, though now, I
fear, wofully fallen off, and perhaps never to be
revived in anything like its former extent), I did not
much interfere. They could safely be left to thetreatment of two as
faithful, upright, and competent subordinates, both
Englishmen, as ever a man was fortunate enough to meet
with, in a line of life altogether new and strange to
him. I had come over with instructions to supply both
their places with Americans, but, possessing a happy
faculty of knowing my own interest and the public's, I
quietly kept hold of them, being little inclined to
open the consular doors to a spy of the State
Department or an intriguer for my own office. The
venerable Vice-Consul, Mr. Pearce, had witnessed the
successive arrivals of a score of newly-appointed
Consuls, shadowy and short-lived dignitaries, and
carried his reminiscences back to the epoch of Consul
Maury, who was appointed by Washington, and has
acquired almost the grandeur of a mythical personage
in the annals of the Consulate. The principal clerk,
Mr. Wilding, who has since succeeded to the
Vice-Consulship, was a man of English integrity,--not
that the English are more honest than ourselves, but
only there is a certain sturdy reliableness common
among them, which we do not quite so invariably
manifest in just these subordinate positions,--of
English integrity, combined with American acuteness of
intellect, quick-wittedness, and diversity of talent.
It seemed an immense pity that he should wear out his
life at a desk, without a step in advance from
year's end to year's end, when, had it been
his luck to be born on our side of the water, his
bright faculties and clear probity would have insured
him eminent success in whatever path he might adopt.
Meanwhile, it would have been a sore mischance to me,
had any better fortune on his part deprived me of Mr.
Wilding's services.

A fair amount of common-sense, some acquaintancewith the United States
Statutes, an insight into character, a tact of
management, a general knowledge of the world, and a
reasonable but not too inveterately decided preference
for his own will and judgment over those of interested
people,--these natural attributes and moderate
acquirements will enable a consul to perform many of
his duties respectably, but not to dispense with a
great variety of other qualifications, only attainable
by long experience. Yet, I think, few consuls are so
well accomplished. An appointment of whatever grade,
in the diplomatic or consular service of America, is
too often what the English call a "job";
that is to say, it is made on private and personal
grounds, without a paramount eye to the public good or
the gentleman's especial fitness for the
position. It is not too much to say (of course
allowing for a brilliant exception here and there),
that an American never is thoroughly qualified for a
foreign post, nor has time to make himself so, before
the revolution of the political wheel discards him
from his office. Our country wrongs itself by
permitting such a system of unsuitable appointments,
and, still more, of removals for no cause, just when
the incumbent might be beginning to ripen into
usefulness. Mere ignorance of official detail is of
comparatively small moment; though it is considered
indispensable, I presume, that a man in any private
capacity shall be thoroughly acquainted with the
machinery and operation of his business, and shall not
necessarily lose his position on having attained such
knowledge. But there are so many more important things
to be thought of, in the qualifications of a foreign
resident, that his technical dexterity or clumsiness
is hardly worth mentioning.

One great part of a consul's duty, for
example, should consist in building up for himself a
recognized position in the society where he resides,
so that his local influence might be felt in behalf of
his own country, and, so far as they are compatible
(as they generally are to the utmost extent), for the
interests of both nations. The foreign city should
know that it has a permanent inhabitant and a hearty
well-wisher in him. There are many conjunctures (and
one of them is now upon us) where a long-established,
honored, and trusted American citizen, holding a
public position under our government in such a town as
Liverpool, might go far towards swaying and directing
the sympathies of the inhabitants. He might throw his
own weight into the balance against mischief-makers;
he might have set his foot on the first little spark
of malignant purpose, which the next wind may blow
into a national war. But we wilfully give up all
advantages of this kind. The position is totally
beyond the attainment of an American; there to-day,
bristling all over with the porcupine quills of our
Republic, and gone to-morrow, just as he is becoming
sensible of the broader and more generous patriotism
which might almost amalgamate with that of England,
without losing an atom of its native force and flavor.
In the changes that appear to await us, and some of
which, at least, can hardly fail to be for good, let
us hope for a reform in this matter.

For myself, as the gentle reader would spare me the
trouble of saying, I was not at all the kind of man to
grow into such an ideal Consul as I have here
suggested. I never in my life desired to be burdened
with public influence. I disliked my office from the
first, and never came into any good accordance withit. Its dignity, so far
as it had any, was an encumbrance; the attentions it
drew upon me (such as invitations to Mayors' banquets
and public celebrations of all kinds, where, to my
horror, I found myself expected to stand up and speak)
were--as I may say without incivility or ingratitude,
because there is nothing personal in that sort of
hospitality--a bore. The official business was
irksome, and often painful. There was nothing pleasant
about the whole affair, except the emoluments; and
even those, never too bountifully reaped, were
diminished by more than half in the second or third
year of my incumbency. All this being true, I was
quite prepared, in advance of the inauguration of Mr.
Buchanan, to send in my resignation. When my successor
arrived, I drew the long, delightful breath which
first made me thoroughly sensible what an unnatural
life I had been leading, and compelled me to admire
myself for having battled with it so sturdily. The
new-comer proved to be a very genial and agreeable
gentleman, an F. F. V., and, as he pleasantly
acknowledged, a Southern Fire-Eater,--an announcement
to which I responded, with similar good-humor and
self-complacency, by parading my descent from an
ancient line of Massachusetts Puritans. Since our
brief acquaintanceship, my fire-eating friend has had
ample opportunities to banquet on his favorite diet,
hot and hot, in the Confederate service. For myself,
as soon as I was out of office, the retrospect began
to look unreal. I could scarcely believe that it was
I,--that figure whom they called a Consul,--but a sort
of Double Ganger, who had been permitted to assume my
aspect, under which he went through his shadowy duties
with a tolerable show of efficiency, while my real
self had lain, as regarded myproper mode of being and acting, in
a state of suspended animation.

The same sense of illusion still pursues me. There
is some mistake in this matter. I have been writing
about another man's consular experiences, with
which, through some mysterious medium of transmitted
ideas, I find myself intimately acquainted, but in
which I cannot possibly have had a personal interest.
Is it not a dream altogether? The figure of that poor
Doctor of Divinity looks wonderfully lifelike; so do
those of the Oriental adventurer with the visionary
coronet above his brow, and the moonstruck visitor of
the Queen, and the poor old wanderer, seeking his
native country through English highways and byways for
almost thirty years; and so would a hundred others
that I might summon up with similar distinctness. But
were they more than shadows? Surely, I think not. Nor
are these present pages a bit of intrusive
autobiography. Let not the reader wrong me by
supposing it. I never should have written with half
such unreserve, had it been a portion of this life
congenial with my nature, which I am living now,
instead of a series of incidents and characters
entirely apart from my own concerns, and on which the
qualities personally proper to me could have had no
bearing. Almost the only real incidents, as I see them
now, were the visits of a young English friend, a
scholar and a literary amateur, between whom and
myself there sprung up an affectionate, and, I trust,
not transitory regard. He used to come and sit or
stand by my fireside, talking vivaciously and
eloquently with me about literature and life, his own
national characteristics and mine, with such kindly
endurance of the many rough republicanisms wherewithI assailed him, and such
frank and amiable assertion of all sorts of English
prejudices and mistakes, that I understood his
countrymen infinitely the better for him, and was
almost prepared to love the intensest Englishman of
them all, for his sake. It would gratify my cherished
remembrance of this dear friend, if I could manage,
without offending him, or letting the public know it,
to introduce his name upon my page. Bright was the
illumination of my dusky little apartment, as often as
he made his appearance there!

The English sketches which I have been offering to
the public comprise a few of the more external, and
therefore more readily manageable, things that I took
note of, in many escapes from the imprisonment of my
consular servitude. Liverpool, though not very
delightful as a place of residence, is a most
convenient and admirable point to get away from.
London is only five hours off by the fast train.
Chester, the most curious town in England, with its
encompassing wall, its ancient rows, and its venerable
cathedral, is close at hand. North Wales, with all its
hills and ponds, its noble sea-scenery, its multitude
of gray castles and strange old villages, may be
glanced at in a summer day or two. The lakes and
mountains of Cumberland and Westmoreland may be
reached before dinner-time. The haunted and legendary
Isle of Man, a little kingdom by itself, lies within
the scope of an afternoon's voyage. Edinburgh or
Glasgow are attainable over night, and Loch Lomond
betimes in the morning. Visiting these famous
localities, and a great many others, I hope that I do
not compromise my American patriotism by acknowledging
that I was often conscious of a fervent hereditary
attachment to the native soil of our forefathers, and
felt it to be our own Old Home.

LEAMINGTON SPA.

IN the course of several visits and stays of
considerable length we acquired a homelike feeling
towards Leamington, and came back thither again and
again, chiefly because we had been there before.
Wandering and wayside people, such as we had long
since become, retain a few of the instincts that
belong to a more settled way of life, and often prefer
familiar and commonplace objects (for the very reason
that they are so) to the dreary strangeness of scenes
that might be thought much better worth the seeing.
There is a small nest of a place in Leamington--at No.
10 Lansdowne Circus--upon which, to this day, my
reminiscences are apt to settle as one of the cosiest
nooks in England or in the world; not that it had any
special charm of its own, but only that we stayed long
enough to know it well, and even to grow a little
tired of it. In my opinion, the very tediousness of
home and friends makes a part of what we love them
for; if it be not mixed in sufficiently with the other
elements of life, there may be mad enjoyment, but no
happiness.

The modest abode to which I have alluded forms one
of a circular range of pretty, moderate-sized,
two-story houses, all built on nearly the same plan,
and each provided with its little grass-plot, its
flowers, its tufts of box trimmed into globes and
other fantastic shapes, and its verdant hedges
shutting the house in from the common drive, and
dividing it from its equally cosey neighbors. Coming
out of the door, and taking a turnround the circle of
sister-dwellings, it is difficult to find your way
back by any distinguishing individuality of your own
habitation. In the centre of the Circus is a space
fenced in with iron railing, a small play-place and
sylvan retreat for the children of the precinct,
permeated by brief paths through the fresh English
grass, and shadowed by various shrubbery; amid which,
if you like, you may fancy yourself in a deep
seclusion, though probably the mark of eye-shot from
the windows of all the surrounding houses. But, in
truth, with regard to the rest of the town and the
world at large, an abode here is a genuine seclusion;
for the ordinary stream of life does not run through
this little, quiet pool, and few or none of the
inhabitants seem to be troubled with any business or
outside activities. I used to set them down as
half-pay officers, dowagers of narrow income, elderly
maiden ladies, and other people of respectability, but
small account, such as hang on the world's
skirts, rather than actually belong to it. The quiet
of the place was seldom disturbed, except by the
grocer and butcher, who came to receive orders; or by
the cabs, hackney-coaches, and Bath-chairs, in which
the ladies took an infrequent airing; or the
livery-steed which the retired captain sometimes
bestrode for a morning ride; or by the red-coated
postman who went his rounds twice a day to deliver
letters, and again in the evening, ringing a
hand-bell, to take letters for the mail. In merely
mentioning these slight interruptions of its sluggish
stillness, I seem to myself to disturb too much the
atmosphere of quiet that brooded over the spot;
whereas its impression upon me was, that the world had
never found the way hither, or had forgotten it, and
that the fortunate inhabitants were the only ones who
possessed thespell-word of admittance. Nothing
could have suited me better, at the time; for I had
been holding a position of public servitude, which
imposed upon me (among a great many lighter duties)
the ponderous necessity of being universally civil and
sociable.

Nevertheless, if a man were seeking the bustle of
society, he might find it more readily in Leamington
than in most other English towns. It is a permanent
watering-place, a sort of institution to which I do
not know any close parallel in American life: for such
places as Saratoga bloom only for the summer-season,
and offer a thousand dissimilitudes even then; while
Leamington seems to be always in flower, and serves as
a home to the homeless all the year round. Its
original nucleus, the plausible excuse for the
town's coming into prosperous existence, lies in
the fiction of a chalybeate well, which, indeed, is so
far a reality that out of its magical depths have
gushed streets, groves, gardens, mansions, shops, and
churches, and spread themselves along the banks of the
little river Leam. This miracle accomplished, the
beneficent fountain has retired beneath a pump-room,
and appears to have given up all pretensions to the
remedial virtues formerly attributed to it. I know not
whether its waters are ever tasted nowadays; but not
the less does Leamington--in pleasant Warwickshire, at
the very midmost point of England, in a good hunting
neighborhood, and surrounded by country-seats and
castles--continue to be a resort of transient
visitors, and the more permanent abode of a class of
genteel, unoccupied, well-to-do, but not very wealthy
people, such as are hardly known among ourselves.
Persons who have no country-houses, and whose fortunes
are inadequate to a London expenditure, find here, I
suppose, a sort of town and country life in one.

In its present aspect the town is of no great age.
In contrast with the antiquity of many places in its
neighborhood, it has a bright, new face, and seems
almost to smile even amid the sombreness of an English
autumn. Nevertheless, it is hundreds upon hundreds of
years old, if we reckon up that sleepy lapse of time
during which it existed as a small village of thatched
houses, clustered round a priory; and it would still
have been precisely such a rural village, but for a
certain Dr. Jephson, who lived within the memory of
man, and who found out the magic well, and foresaw
what fairy wealth might be made to flow from it. A
public garden has been laid out along the margin of
the Leam, and called the Jephson Garden, in honor of
him who created the prosperity of his native spot. A
little way within the garden-gate there is a circular
temple of Grecian architecture, beneath the dome of
which stands a marble statue of the good Doctor, very
well executed, and representing him with a face of
fussy activity and benevolence: just the kind of man,
if luck favored him, to build up the fortunes of those
about him, or, quite as probably, to blight his whole
neighborhood by some disastrous speculation.

The Jephson Garden is very beautiful, like most
other English pleasure-grounds; for, aided by their
moist climate and not too fervid sun, the
landscape-gardeners excel in converting flat or tame
surfaces into attractive scenery, chiefly through the
skilful arrangement of trees and shrubbery. An
Englishman aims at this effect even in the little
patches under the windows of a suburban villa, and
achieves it on a larger scale in a tract of many
acres. The Garden is shadowed with trees of a fine
growth, standing alone, or in dusky groves and dense
entanglements, pervadedby woodland paths; and emerging
from these pleasant glooms, we come upon a breadth of
sunshine, where the greensward--so vividly green that
it has a kind of lustre in it--is spotted with beds of
gem-like flowers. Rustic chairs and benches are
scattered about, some of them ponderously fashioned
out of the stumps of obtruncated trees, and others
more artfully made with intertwining branches, or
perhaps an imitation of such frail handiwork in iron.
In a central part of the Garden is an archery-ground,
where laughing maidens practise at the butts,
generally missing their ostensible mark, but, by the
mere grace of their action, sending an unseen shaft
into some young man's heart. There is space,
moreover, within these precincts, for an artificial
lake, with a little green island in the midst of it;
both lake and island being the haunt of swans, whose
aspect and movement in the water are most beautiful
and stately,--most infirm, disjointed, and decrepit,
when, unadvisedly, they see fit to emerge, and try to
walk upon dry land. In the latter case, they look like
a breed of uncommonly ill-contrived geese; and I
record the matter here for the sake of the
moral,--that we should never pass judgment on the
merits of any person or thing, unless we behold them
in the sphere and circumstances to which they are
specially adapted. In still another part of the Garden
there is a labyrinthine maze formed of an intricacy of
hedge-bordered walks, involving himself in which, a
man might wander for hours inextricably within a
circuit of only a few yards. It seemed to me a sad
emblem of the mental and moral perplexities in which
we sometimes go astray, petty in scope, yet large
enough to entangle a lifetime, and bewilder us with a
weary movement, but no genuine progress.

The Leam,--the "high complexioned Leam,"
as Drayton calls it,--after drowsing across the
principal street of the town, beneath a handsome
bridge, skirts along the margin of the Garden without
any perceptible flow. Heretofore I had fancied the
Concord the laziest river in the world, but now assign
that amiable distinction to the little English stream.
Its water is by no means transparent, but has a
greenish, goose-puddly hue, which, however, accords
well with the other coloring and characteristics of
the scene, and is disagreeable neither to sight nor
smell. Certainly, this river is a perfect feature of
that gentle picturesqueness in which England is so
rich, sleeping, as it does, beneath a margin of
willows that droop into its bosom, and other trees, of
deeper verdure than our own country can boast,
inclining lovingly over it. On the Garden-side it is
bordered by a shadowy, secluded grove, with winding
paths among its boskiness, affording many a peep at
the river's imperceptible lapse and tranquil gleam;
and on the opposite shore stands the priory-church,
with its churchyard full of shrubbery and tombstones.

The business portion of the town clusters about the
banks of the Leam, and is naturally densest around the
well to which the modern settlement owes its
existence. Here are the commercial inns, the
post-office, the furniture-dealers, the iron-mongers,
and all the heavy and homely establishments that
connect themselves even with the airiest modes of
human life while upward from the river, by a long and
gentle ascent, rises the principal street, which is
very bright and cheerful in its physiognomy, and
adorned with shop-fronts almost as splendid as those
of London, though on a diminutive scale. There are
likewiseside-streets
and cross-streets, many of which are bordered with the
beautiful Warwickshire elm, a most unusual kind of
adornment for an English town; and spacious avenues,
wide enough to afford room for stately groves, with
foot-paths running beneath the lofty shade, and rooks
cawing and chattering so high in the tree-tops that
their voices get musical before reaching the earth.
The houses are mostly built in blocks and ranges, in
which every separate tenement is a repetition of its
fellow, though the architecture of the different
ranges is sufficiently various. Some of them are
almost palatial in size and sumptuousness of
arrangement. Then, on the outskirts of the town, there
are detached villas, enclosed within that separate
domain of high stone fence and embowered shrubbery
which an Englishman so loves to build and plant around
his abode, presenting to the public only an iron gate,
with a gravelled carriage-drive winding away towards
the half-hidden mansion. Whether in street or suburb,
Leamington may fairly be called beautiful, and, at
some points, magnificent; but by and by you become
doubtfully suspicious of a somewhat unreal finery: it
is pretentious, though not glaringly so; it has been
built with malice aforethought, as a place of
gentility and enjoyment. Moreover, splendid as the
houses look, and comfortable as they often are, there
is a nameless something about them, betokening that
they have not grown out of human hearts, but are the
creations of a skilfully applied human intellect: no
man has reared any one of them, whether stately or
humble, to be his life-long residence, wherein to
bring up his children, who are to inherit it as a
home. They are nicely contrived lodging-houses, one
and all,--the best as well as theshabbiest of them,--and therefore
inevitably lack some nameless property that a home
should have. This was the case with our own little
snuggery in Lansdowne Circus, as with all the rest; it
had not grown out of anybody's individual need,
but was built to let or sell, and was therefore like a
ready-made garment,--a tolerable fit, but only
tolerable.

All these blocks, ranges, and detached villas are
adorned with the finest and most aristocratic names
that I have found anywhere in England, except perhaps,
in Bath, which is the great metropolis of that
second-class gentility with which watering-places are
chiefly populated. Lansdowne Crescent, Lansdowne
Circus, Lansdowne Terrace, Regent Street, Warwick
Street, Clarendon Street, the Upper and Lower Parade:
such are a few of the designations. Parade, indeed, is
a well-chosen name for the principal street, along
which the population of the idle town draws itself out
for daily review and display. I only wish that my
descriptive powers would enable me to throw off a
picture of the scene at a sunny noontide,
individualizing each character with a touch; the great
people alighting from their carriages at the principal
shop-doors; the elderly ladies and infirm Indian
officers drawn along in Bath-chairs; the comely,
rather than pretty, English girls, with their deep,
healthy bloom, which an American taste is apt to deem
fitter for a milkmaid than for a lady; the mustached
gentlemen with frogged surtouts and a military air;
the nursemaids and chubby children, but no chubbier
than our own, and scampering on slenderer legs; the
sturdy figure of John Bull in all varieties and of all
ages, but ever with the stamp of authenticity
somewhere about him.

To say the truth, I have been holding the pen over
my paper, purposing to write a descriptive paragraph
or two about the throng on the principal Parade of
Leamington, so arranging it as to present a sketch of
the British out-of-door aspect on a morning walk of
gentility; but I find no personages quite sufficiently
distinct and individual in my memory to supply the
materials of such a panorama. Oddly enough, the only
figure that comes fairly forth to my mind's eye
is that of a dowager, one of hundreds whom I used to
marvel at, all over England, but who have scarcely a
representative among our own ladies of autumnal life,
so thin, careworn, and frail, as age usually makes the
latter.

I have heard a good deal of the tenacity with which
English ladies retain their personal beauty to a late
period of life; but (not to suggest that an American
eye needs use and cultivation before it can quite
appreciate the charm of English beauty at any age) it
strikes me that an English lady of fifty is apt to
become a creature less refined and delicate, so far as
her physique goes, than anything that we Western
people class under the name of woman. She has an awful
ponderosity of frame, not pulpy, like the looser
development of our few fat women, but massive with
solid beef and streaky tallow; so that (though
struggling manfully against the idea) you inevitably
think of her as made up of steaks and sirloins. When
she walks, her advance is elephantine. When she sits
down, it is on a great round space of her Maker's
footstool, where she looks as if nothing could ever
move her. She imposes awe and respect by the muchness
of her personality, to such a degree that you probably
credit her with far greater moral and intellectual
force than she can fairly claim. Her visage is usually
grim andstern, seldom
positively forbidding, yet calmly terrible, not merely
by its breadth and weight of feature, but because it
seems to express so much well-founded self-reliance,
such acquaintance with the world, its toils, troubles,
and dangers, and such sturdy capacity for trampling
down a foe. Without anything positively salient, or
actively offensive, or, indeed, unjustly formidable to
her neighbors, she has the effect of a seventy-four
gun-ship in time of peace; for, while you assure
yourself that there is no real danger, you cannot help
thinking how tremendous would be her onset if
pugnaciously inclined, and how futile the effort to
inflict any counter-injury. She certainly looks
ten-fold--nay, a hundred-fold--better able to take
care of herself than our slender-framed and haggard
womankind; but I have not found reason to suppose that
the English dowager of fifty has actually greater
courage, fortitude, and strength of character than our
women of similar age, or even a tougher physical
endurance than they. Morally, she is strong, I
suspect, only in society, and in the common routine of
social affairs, and would be found powerless and timid
in any exceptional strait that might call for energy
outside of the conventionalities amid which she has
grown up.

You can meet this figure in the street, and live,
and even smile at the recollection. But conceive of
her in a ball-room, with the bare, brawny arms that
she invariably displays there, and all the other
corresponding development, such as is beautiful in the
maiden blossom, but a spectacle to howl at in such an
over-blown cabbage-rose as this.

Yet, somewhere in this enormous bulk there must be
hidden the modest, slender, violet-nature of a girl,whom an alien mass of
earthliness has unkindly overgrown; for an English
maiden in her teens, though very seldom so pretty as
our own damsels, possesses, to say the truth, a
certain charm of half-blossom, and delicately folded
leaves, and tender womanhood shielded by maidenly
reserves, with which, somehow or other, our American
girls often fail to adorn themselves during an
appreciable moment. It is a pity that the English
violet should grow into such an outrageously developed
peony as I have attempted to describe. I wonder
whether a middle-aged husband ought to be considered
as legally married to all the accretions that have
overgrown the slenderness of his bride, since he led
her to the altar, and which make her so much more than
he ever bargained for! Is it not a sounder view of the
case, that the matrimonial bond cannot be held to
include the three fourths of the wife that had no
existence when the ceremony was performed? And as a
matter of conscience and good morals, ought not an
English married pair to insist upon the celebration of
a silver-wedding at the end of twenty-five years, in
order to legalize and mutually appropriate that
corporeal growth of which both parties have
individually come into possession since they were
pronounced one flesh?

The chief enjoyment of my several visits to
Leamington lay in rural walks about the neighborhood,
and in jaunts to places of note and interest, which
are particularly abundant in that region. The
high-roads are made pleasant to the traveller by a
border of trees, and often afford him the hospitality
of a wayside bench beneath a comfortable shade. But a
fresher delight is to be found in the footpaths, which
go wandering away from stile to stile, along hedges,
andacross broad
fields, and through wooded parks, leading you to
little hamlets of thatched cottages, ancient, solitary
farm-houses, picturesque old mills, streamlets, pools,
and all those quiet, secret, unexpected, yet strangely
familiar features of English scenery that Tennyson
shows us in his idyls and eclogues. These by-paths
admit the wayfarer into the very heart of rural life,
and yet do not burden him with a sense of
intrusiveness. He has a right to go whithersoever they
lead him; for, with all their shaded privacy, they are
as much the property of the public as the dusty
high-road itself, and even by an older tenure. Their
antiquity probably exceeds that of the Roman ways; the
footsteps of the aboriginal Britons first wore away
the grass, and the natural flow of intercourse between
village and village has kept the track bare ever
since. An American farmer would plough across any
such path, and obliterate it with his hills of
potatoes and Indian corn; but here it is protected by
law, and still more by the sacredness that inevitably
springs up, in this soil, along the well-defined
footprints of centuries. Old associations are sure to
be fragrant herbs in English nostrils, we pull them up
as weeds,

I remember such a path, the access to which is from
Lovers' Grove, a range of tall old oaks and elms
on a high hill-top, whence there is a view of Warwick
Castle, and a wide extent of landscape, beautiful,
though bedimmed with English mist. This particular
foot-path, however, is not a remarkably good specimen
of its kind, since it leads into no hollows and
seclusions, and soon terminates in a high-road. It
connects Leamington by a short cut with the small
neighboring village of Lillington, a place which
impresses an American observer with its many points of
contrastto the rural
aspects of his own country. The village consists
chiefly of one row of contiguous dwellings, separated
only by party-walls, but ill-matched among themselves,
being of different heights, and apparently of various
ages, though all are of an antiquity which we should
call venerable. Some of the windows are leaden-framed
lattices opening on hinges. These houses are mostly
built of gray stone; but others, in the same range,
are of brick, and one or two are in a very old
fashion,--Elizabethan, or still older,--having a
ponderous frame-work of oak, painted black, and filled
in with plastered stone or bricks. Judging by the
patches of repair, the oak seems to be the more
durable part of the structure. Some of the roofs are
covered with earthen tiles; others (more decayed and
poverty-stricken) with thatch, out of which sprouts a
luxurious vegetation of grass, house-leeks, and yellow
flowers. What especially strikes an American is the
lack of that insulated space, the intervening gardens,
grass-plots, orchards, broad-spreading shade-trees,
which occur between our own village-houses. These
English dwellings have no such separate surroundings;
they all grow together, like the cells of a honeycomb.

Beyond the first row of houses, and hidden from it
by a turn of the road, there was another row (or
block, as we should call it) of small old cottages,
stuck one against another, with their thatched roofs
forming a single contiguity. These, I presume, were
the habitations of the poorest order of rustic
laborers; and the narrow precincts of each cottage, as
well as the close neighborhood of the whole, gave the
impression of a stifled, unhealthy atmosphere among
the occupants. It seemed impossible that there should
be a cleanly reserve, a proper self-respect among
individuals, or awholesome unfamiliarity between
families where human life was crowded and massed into
such intimate communities as these. Nevertheless, not
to look beyond the outside, I never saw a prettier
rural scene than was presented by this range of
contiguous huts. For in front of the whole row was a
luxuriant and well-trimmed hawthorn hedge, and
belonging to each cottage was a little square of
garden-ground, separated from its neighbors by a line
of the same verdant fence. The gardens were
chockfull, not of esculent vegetables, but of flowers,
familiar ones, but very bright-colored, and shrubs of
box, some of which were trimmed into artistic shapes;
and I remember, before one door, a representation of
Warwick Castle, made of oyster-shells. The cottagers
evidently loved the little nests in which they dwelt,
and did their best to make them beautiful, and
succeeded more than tolerably well,--so kindly did
nature help their humble efforts with its verdure,
flowers, moss, lichens, and the green things that grew
out of the thatch. Through some of the open doorways
we saw plump children rolling about on the stone
floors, and their mothers, by no means very pretty,
but as happy-looking as mothers generally are; and
while we gazed at these domestic matters an old woman
rushed wildly out of one of the gates, upholding a
shovel, on which she clanged and clattered with a key.
At first we fancied that she intended an onslaught
against ourselves, but soon discovered that a more
dangerous enemy was abroad; for the old lady's
bees had swarmed, and the air was full of them,
whizzing by our heads like bullets.

Not far from these two rows of houses and cottages,
a green lane, overshadowed with trees, turned aside
from the main road, and tended towards a square,gray tower, the
battlements of which were just high enough to be
visible above the foliage. Wending our way
thitherward, we found the very picture and ideal of a
country church and churchyard. The tower seemed to be
of Norman architecture, low, massive, and crowned with
battlements. The body of the church was of very modest
dimensions, and the eaves so low that I could touch
them with my walking-stick. We looked into the
windows and beheld the dim and quiet interior, a
narrow space, but venerable with the consecration of
many centuries, and keeping its sanctity as entire and
inviolate as that of a vast cathedral. The nave was
divided from the side aisles of the church by pointed
arches resting on very sturdy pillars: it was good to
see how solemnly they held themselves to their
age-long task of supporting that lowly roof. There was
a small organ, suited in size to the vaulted hollow,
which it weekly filled with religious sound. On the
opposite wall of the church, between two windows, was
a mural tablet of white marble, with an inscription in
black letters,--the only such memorial that I could
discern, although many dead people doubtless lay
beneath the floor, and had paved it with their ancient
tombstones, as is customary in old English churches.
There were no modern painted windows, flaring with raw
colors, nor other gorgeous adornments, such as the
present taste for mediæval restoration often
patches upon the decorous simplicity of the gray
village-church. It is probably the worshipping-place
of no more distinguished a congregation than the
farmers and peasantry who inhabit the houses and
cottages which I have just described. Had the lord of
the manor been one of the parishioners, there would
have been an eminent pew near the chancel, walledhigh about, curtained,
and softly cushioned, warmed by a fireplace of its
own, and distinguished by hereditary tablets and
escutcheons on the enclosed stone pillar.

A well-trodden path led across the churchyard, and
the gate being on the latch, we entered, and walked
round among the graves and monuments. The latter were
chiefly head-stones, none of which were very old, so
far as was discoverable by the dates; some, indeed, in
so ancient a cemetery, were disagreeably new, with
inscriptions glittering like sunshine in gold letters.
The ground must have been dug over and over again,
innumerable times, until the soil is made up of what
was once human clay, out of which have sprung
successive crops of gravestones, that flourish their
allotted time, and disappear, like the weeds and
flowers in their briefer period. The English climate
is very unfavorable to the endurance of memorials in
the open air. Twenty years of it suffice to give as
much antiquity of aspect, whether to tombstone or
edifice, as a hundred years of our own drier
atmosphere,--so soon do the drizzly rains and constant
moisture corrode the surface of marble or freestone.
Sculptured edges lose their sharpness in a year or
two; yellow lichens overspread a beloved name, and
obliterate it while it is yet fresh upon some
survivor's heart. Time gnaws an English
gravestone with wonderful appetite; and when the
inscription is quite illegible, the sexton takes the
useless slab away, and perhaps makes a hearthstone of
it, and digs up the unripe bones which it
ineffectually tried to memorialize, and gives the bed
to another sleeper. In the Charter Street
burial-ground at Salem, and in the old graveyard on
the hill at Ipswich, I have seen more ancient
gravestones, withlegible
inscriptions on them,
than in any English church-yard.

And yet this same ungenial climate, hostile as it
generally is to the long remembrance of departed
people, has sometimes a lovely way of dealing with the
records on certain monuments that lie horizontally in
the open air. The rain falls into the deep incisions
of the letters, and has scarcely time to be dried away
before another shower sprinkles the flat stone again,
and replenishes those little reservoirs. The unseen,
mysterious seeds of mosses find their way into the
lettered furrows, and are made to germinate by the
continual moisture and watery sunshine of the English
sky; and by and by, in a year, or two years, or many
years, behold the complete inscription--

HERE LYETH THE BODY,

and all the rest of the tender
falsehood--beautifully embossed in raised letters of
living green, a bas-relief of velvet moss on the
marble slab! It becomes more legible, under the skyey
influences, after the world has forgotten the
deceased, than when it was fresh from the
stone-cutter's hands. It outlives the grief of
friends. I first saw an example of this in Bebbington
churchyard, in Cheshire, and thought, that Nature must
needs have had a special tenderness for the person (no
noted man, however, in the world's history) so long
ago laid beneath that stone, since she took such
wonderful pains to "keep his memory green."
Perhaps the proverbial phrase just quoted may have had
its origin in the natural phenomenon here described.

While we rested ourselves on a horizontal monument,
which was elevated just high enough to be aconvenient seat, I
observed that one of the gravestones lay very close to
the church,--so close that the droppings of the eaves
would fall upon it. It seemed as if the inmate of that
grave had desired to creep under the church-wall. On
closer inspection, we found an almost illegible
epitaph on the stone, and with difficulty made out
this forlorn verse:

"Poorly lived,
And poorly died,
Poorly buried,
And no one cried."

It would be hard to compress the story of a cold and
luckless life, death, and burial into fewer words, or
more impressive ones; at least, we found them
impressive, perhaps because we had to re-create the
inscription by scraping away the lichens from the
faintly traced letters. The grave was on the shady and
damp side of the church, endwise towards it, the
head-stone being within about three feet of the
foundation-wall; so that, unless the poor man was a
dwarf, he must have been doubled up to fit him into
his final resting-place. No wonder that his epitaph
murmured against so poor a burial as this! His name,
as well as I could make it out, was Treeo,--John
Treeo, I think,--and he died in 1810, at the age of
seventy-four. The gravestone is so overgrown with
grass and weeds, so covered with unsightly lichens,
and so crumbly with time and foul weather, that it is
questionable whether anybody will ever be at the
trouble of deciphering it again. But there is a quaint
and sad kind of enjoyment in defeating (to such slight
degree as my pen may do it) the probabilities of
oblivion for poor John Treeo, and asking a little
sympathy for him, half a century after his death, and
making him better andmore widely known, at least, than
any other slumberer in Lillington churchyard: he
having been, as appearances go, the outcast of them
all.

You find similar old churches and villages in all
the neighboring country, at the distance of every two
or three miles; and I describe them, not as being
rare, but because they are so common and
characteristic. The village of Whitnash, within
twenty minutes' walk of Leamington, looks as
secluded, as rural, and as little disturbed by the
fashions of to-day, as if Dr. Jephson had never
developed all those Parades and Crescents out of his
magic well. I used to wonder whether the inhabitants
had ever yet heard of railways, or, their slow rate of
progress, had even reached the epoch of stage-coaches.
As you approach the village, while it is yet unseen,
you observe a tall, overshadowing canopy of elm-tree
tops, beneath which you almost hesitate to follow the
public road, on account of the remoteness that seems
to exist between the precincts of this old-world
community and the thronged modern street out of which
you have so recently emerged. Venturing onward,
however, you soon find yourself in the heart of
Whitnash, and see an irregular ring of ancient rustic
dwellings surrounding the village-green, on one side
of which stands the church, with its square Norman
tower and battlements, while close adjoining is the
vicarage, made picturesque by peaks and gables. At
first glimpse, none of the houses appear to be less
than two or three centuries old, and they are of the
ancient, wooden-framed fashion, with thatched roofs,
which give them the air of birds' nests, thereby
assimilating them closely to the simplicity of nature.

The church-tower is mossy and much gnawed by time;
it has narrow loopholes up and down its frontand sides, and an arched
window over the low portal, set with small panes of
glass, cracked, dim, and irregular, through which a
by-gone age is peeping out into the day-light. Some of
those old, grotesque faces, called gargoyles, are seen
on the projections of the architecture. The churchyard
is very small, and is encompassed by a gray stone
fence that looks as ancient as the church itself. In
front of the tower, on the village-green, is a
yew-tree of incalculable age, with a vast
circumference of trunk, but a very scanty head of
foliage; though its boughs still keep some of the
vitality which, perhaps, was in its early prime when
the Saxon invaders founded Whitnash. A thousand years
is no extraordinary antiquity in the lifetime of a
yew. We were pleasantly startled, however, by
discovering an exuberance of more youthful life than
we had thought possible in so old a tree; for the
faces of two children laughed at us out of an opening
in the trunk, which had become hollow with long decay.
On one side of the yew stood a framework of worm-eaten
timber, the use and meaning of which puzzled me
exceedingly, till I made it out to be the
village-stocks; a public institution that, in its day,
had doubtless hampered many a pair of shank-bones, now
crumbling in the adjacent churchyard. It is not to be
supposed, however, that this old-fashioned mode of
punishment is still in vogue among the good people of
Whitnash. The vicar of the parish has antiquarian
propensities, and had probably dragged the stocks out
of some dusty hiding-place and set them up on the
former site as a curiosity.

I disquiet myself in vain with the effort to hit
upon some characteristic feature, or assemblage of
features, that shall convey to the reader the
influence of hoarantiquity lingering into the
present daylight, as I so often felt it in these old
English scenes. It is only an American who can feel
it; and even he begins to find himself growing
insensible to its effect, after a long residence in
England. But while you are still new in the old
country, it thrills you with strange emotion to think
that this little church of Whitnash, humble as it
seems, stood for ages under the Catholic faith, and
has not materially changed since Wickliffe's days, and
that it looked as gray as now in Bloody Mary's
time, and that Cromwell's troopers broke off the
stone noses of those same gargoyles that are now
grinning in your face. So, too, with the immemorial
yew-tree; you see its great roots grasping hold of the
earth like gigantic claws, clinging so sturdily that
no effort of time can wrench them away; and there
being life in the old tree, you feel all the more as
if a contemporary witness were telling you of the
things that have been. It has lived among men, and
been a familiar object to them, and seen them brought
to be christened and married and buried in the
neighboring church and churchyard, through so many
centuries, that it knows all about our race, so far as
fifty generations of the Whitnash people can supply
such knowledge.

And, after all, what a weary life it must have been
for the old tree! Tedious beyond imagination! Such, I
think, is the final impression on the mind of an
American visitor, when his delight at finding
something permanent begins to yield to his Western
love of change, and he becomes sensible of the heavy
air of a spot where the forefathers and foremothers
have grown up together, intermarried, and died,
through a long succession of lives, without any
intermixture ofnew
elements, till family features and character are all
run in the same inevitable mould. Life is there
fossilized in its greenest leaf. The man who died
yesterday or ever so long ago walks the village-street
to-day, and chooses the same wife that he married a
hundred years since, and must be buried again tomorrow
under the same kindred dust that has already covered
him half a score of times. The stone threshold of his
cottage is worn away with his hobnailed footsteps,
shuffling over it from the reign of the first
Plantagenet to that of Victoria. Better than this is
the lot of our restless countrymen, whose modern
instinct bids them tend always towards "fresh
woods and pastures new." Rather than such
monotony of sluggish ages, loitering on a
village-green, toiling in hereditary fields, listening
to the parson's drone lengthened through centuries in
the gray Norman church, let us welcome whatever change
may come,--change of place, social customs, political
institutions, modes of worship,--trusting that, if all
present things shall vanish, they will but make room
for better systems, and for a higher type of man to
clothe his life in them, and to fling them off in
turn.

Nevertheless, while an American willingly accepts
growth and change as the law of his own national and
private existence, he has a singular tenderness for
the stone-incrusted institutions of the
mother-country. The reason may be (though I should
prefer a more generous explanation) that he recognizes
the tendency of these hardened forms to stiffen her
joints and fetter her ankles, in the race and rivalry
of improvement. I hated to see so much as a twig of
ivy wrenched away from an old wall in England. Yet
change is at work, even in such a village as Whitnash.
At a subsequentvisit,
looking more critically at the irregular circle of
dwellings that surround the yew-tree and confront the
church, I perceived that some of the houses must have
been built within no long time, although the thatch,
the quaint gables, and the old oaken framework of the
others diffused an air of antiquity over the whole
assemblage. The church itself was undergoing repair
and restoration, which is but another name for change.
Masons were making patch-work on the front of the
tower, and were sawing a slab of stone and piling up
bricks to strengthen the side-wall, or possibly to
enlarge the ancient edifice by an additional aisle.
Moreover, they had dug an immense pit in the
churchyard, long and broad, and fifteen feet deep, two
thirds of which profundity were discolored by human
decay, and mixed up with crumbly bones. What this
excavation was intended for I could nowise imagine,
unless it were the very pit in which Longfellow bids
the "Dead Past bury its dead," and Whitnash,
of all places in the world, were going to avail itself
of our poet's suggestion. If so, it must needs be
confessed that many picturesque and delightful things
would be thrown into the hole, and covered out of
sight forever.

The article which I am writing has taken its own
course, and occupied itself almost wholly with country
churches; whereas I had purposed to attempt a
description of some of the many old towns--Warwick,
Coventry, Kenilworth, Stratford-on-Avon--which lie
within an easy scope of Leamington. And still another
church presents itself to my remembrance. It is that
of Hatton, on which I stumbled in the course of a
forenoon's ramble, and paused a little while to
look at it for the sake of old Dr. Parr, who was once
its vicar. Hatton, so far as I could discover, has
nopublic-house, no
shop, no contiguity of roofs (as in most English
villages, however small), but is merely an ancient
neighborhood of farm-houses, spacious, and standing
wide apart, each within its own precincts, and
offering a most comfortable aspect of orchards,
harvest-fields, barns, stacks, and all manner of rural
plenty. It seemed to be a community of old settlers,
among whom everything had been going on prosperously
since an epoch beyond the memory of man; and they kept
a certain privacy among themselves, and dwelt on a
crossroad, at the entrance of which was a barred gate,
hospitably open, but still impressing me with a sense
of scarcely warrantable intrusion. After all, in some
shady nook of those gentle Warwickshire slopes, there
may have been a denser and more populous settlement
styled Hatton, which I never reached.

Emerging from the by-road, and entering upon one
that crossed it at right angles and led to Warwick, I
espied the church of Dr. Parr. Like the others which I
have described, it had a low stone tower, square, and
battlemented at its summit: for all these little
churches seem to have been built on the same model,
and nearly at the same measurement, and have even a
greater family-likeness than the cathedrals. As I
approached, the bell of the tower (a remarkably
deep-toned bell, considering how small it was) flung
its voice abroad, and told me that it was noon. The
church stands among its graves, a little removed from
the wayside, quite apart from any collection of
houses, and with no signs of a vicarage; it is a good
deal shadowed by trees, and not wholly destitute of
ivy. The body of the edifice, unfortunately (and it
is an outrage which the English churchwardens are fond
of perpetrating), has been newly covered with a
yellowishplaster or
wash, so as quite to destroy the aspect of antiquity,
except upon the tower, which wears the dark gray hue
of many centuries. The chancel-window is painted with
a representation of Christ upon the Cross, and all the
other windows are full of painted or stained glass,
but none of it ancient, nor (if it be fair to judge
from without of what ought to be seen within)
possessing any of the tender glory that should be the
inheritance of this branch of Art, revived from
mediæval times. I stepped over the graves, and
peeped in at two or three of the windows, and saw the
snug interior of the church glimmering through the
many-colored panes, like a show of commonplace objects
under the fantastic influence of a dream: for the
floor was covered with modern pews, very like what we
may see in a New England meeting-house, though, I
think, a little more favorable than those would be to
the quiet slumbers of the Hatton farmers and their
families. Those who slept under Dr. Parr's
preaching now prolong their nap, I suppose, in the
churchyard round about, and can scarcely have drawn
much spiritual benefit from any truths that he
contrived to tell them in their lifetime. It struck me
as a rare example (even where examples are numerous)
of a man utterly misplaced, that this enormous
scholar, great in the classic tongues, and inevitably
converting his own simplest vernacular into a learned
language, should have been set up in this homely
pulpit, and ordained to preach salvation to a rustic
audience, to whom it is difficult to imagine how he
could ever have spoken one available word.

Almost always, in visiting such scenes as I have
been attempting to describe, I had a singular sense of
having been there before. The ivy-grown Englishchurches (even that of
Bebbington, the first that I beheld) were quite as
familiar to me, when fresh from home, as the old
wooden meeting-house in Salem, which used, on wintry
Sabbaths, to be the frozen purgatory of my childhood.
This was a bewildering, yet very delightful emotion
fluttering about me like a faint summer wind, and
filling my imagination with a thousand
half-remembrances, which looked as vivid as sunshine
at a side-glance, but faded quite away whenever I
attempted to grasp and define them. Of course, the
explanation of the mystery was, that history, poetry,
and fiction, books of travel, and the talk of
tourists, had given me pretty accurate preconceptions
of the common objects of English scenery, and these,
being long ago vivified by a youthful fancy, had
insensibly taken their places among the images of
things actually seen. Yet the illusion was often so
powerful, that I almost doubted whether such airy
remembrances might not be a sort of innate idea, the
print of a recollection in some ancestral mind,
transmitted, with fainter and fainter impress through
several descents, to my own. I felt, indeed, like the
stalwart progenitor in person, returning to the
hereditary haunts after more than two hundred years,
and finding the church, the hall, the farm-house, the
cottage, hardly changed during his long absence,--the
same shady by-paths and hedge-lanes, the same veiled
sky, and green lustre of the lawns and fields,--while
his own affinities for these things, a little obscured
by disuse, were reviving at every step.

An American is not very apt to love the English
people, as a whole, on whatever length of
acquaintance. I fancy that they would value our
regard, and even reciprocate it in their ungracious
way, if we couldgive
it to them in spite of all rebuffs; but they are beset
by a curious and inevitable infelicity, which compels
them, as it were, to keep up what they seem to
consider a wholesome bitterness of feeling between
themselves and all other nationalities, especially
that of America. They will never confess it;
nevertheless, it is as essential a tonic to them as
their bitter ale. Therefore,--and possibly, too, from
a similar narrowness in his own character,--an
American seldom feels quite as if he were at home
among the English people. If he do so, he has ceased
to be an American. But it requires no long residence
to make him love their island, and appreciate it as
thoroughly as they themselves do. For my part, I used
to wish that we could annex it, transferring their
thirty millions of inhabitants to some convenient
wilderness in the great West, and putting half or a
quarter as many of ourselves into their places. The
change would be beneficial to both parties. We, in our
dry atmosphere, are getting too nervous, haggard,
dyspeptic, extenuated, unsubstantial, theoretic, and
need to be made grosser. John Bull, on the other hand,
has grown bulbous, long-bodied, short-legged,
heavy-witted, material, and, in a word, too intensely
English. In a few more centuries he will be the
earthliest creature that ever the earth saw.
Heretofore Providence has obviated such a result by
timely intermixtures of alien races with the old
English stock; so that each successive conquest of
England has proved a victory by the revivification and
improvement of its native manhood. Cannot America and
England hit upon some scheme to secure even greater
advantages to both nations?

ABOUT WARWICK.

BETWEEN bright, new Leamington, the growth of the
present century, and rusty Warwick, founded by King
Cymbeline in the twilight ages, a thousand years
before the mediæval darkness, there are two
roads, either of which may be measured by a
sober-paced pedestrian in less than half an hour.

One of these avenues flows out of the midst of the
smart parades and crescents of the former town, along
by hedges and beneath the shadow of great elms, past
stuccoed Elizabethan villas and wayside alehouses, and
through a hamlet of modern aspect,--and runs straight
into the principal thoroughfare of Warwick. The
battlemented turrets of the castle, embowered half-way
up in foliage, and the tall, slender tower of St.
Mary's Church, rising from among clustered roofs,
have been visible almost from the commencement of the
walk. Near the entrance of the town stands St.
John's School-House, a picturesque old edifice of
stone, with four peaked gables in a row, alternately
plain and ornamented, and wide, projecting windows,
and a spacious and venerable porch, all overgrown with
moss and ivy, and shut in from the world by a high
stone fence, not less mossy than the gabled front.
There is an iron gate, through the rusty open-work of
which you see a grassy lawn, and almost expect to meet
the shy, curious eyes of the little boys of past
generations, peeping forth from their infantile
antiquity into the strangeness of our present life. I
find a peculiarcharm
in these long-established English schools, where the
school-boy of to-day sits side by side, as it were,
with his great-grandsire, on the same old benches, and
often, I believe, thumbs a later, but unimproved
edition of the same old grammar or arithmetic. The
new-fangled notions of a Yankee school-committee would
madden many a pedagogue, and shake down the roof of
many a time-honored seat of learning, in the
mother-country.

At this point, however, we will turn back, in order
to follow up the other road from Leamington, which was
the one that I loved best to take. It pursues a
straight and level course, bordered by wide
gravel-walks and overhung by the frequent elm, with
here a cottage and there a villa; on one side a wooden
plantation, and on the other a rich field of grass or
grain; until, turning at right angles, it brings you
to an arched bridge over the Avon. Its parapet is a
balustrade carved out of freestone, into the soft
substance of which a multitude of persons have
engraved their names or initials, many of them now
illegible, while others, more deeply cut, are
illuminated with fresh green moss. These tokens
indicate a famous spot; and casting our eyes along the
smooth gleam and shadow of the quiet stream, through a
vista of willows that droop on either side into the
water, we behold the gray magnificence of Warwick
Castle, uplifting itself among stately trees, and
rearing its turrets high above their loftiest
branches. We can scarcely think the scene real, so
completely do those machicolated towers, the long line
of battlements, the massive buttresses, the
high-windowed walls, shape out our indistinct ideas of
the antique time. It might rather seem as if the
sleepy river (being Shakespeare's Avon, and
often, nodoubt, the
mirror of his gorgeous visions) were dreaming now of a
lordly residence that stood here many centuries ago;
and this fantasy is strengthened, when you observe
that the image in the tranquil water has all the
distinctness of the actual structure. Either might be
the reflection of the other. Wherever Time has gnawed
one of the stones, you see the mark of his tooth just
as plainly in the sunken reflection. Each is so
perfect, that the upper vision seems a castle in the
air, and the lower one an old stronghold of feudalism,
miraculously kept from decay in an enchanted river.

A ruinous and ivy-grown bridge, that projects from
the bank a little on the hither side of the castle,
has the effect of making the scene appear more
entirely apart from the every-day world, for it ends
abruptly in the middle of the stream,--so that, if a
cavalcade of the knights and ladies of romance should
issue from the old walls, they could never tread on
earthly ground any more than we, approaching from the
side of modern realism, can overleap the gulf between
our domain and theirs. Yet, if we seek to disenchant
ourselves, it may readily be done. Crossing the bridge
on which we stand, and passing a little farther on, we
come to the entrance of the castle, abutting on the
highway, and hospitably open at certain hours to all
curious pilgrims who choose to disburse half a crown
or so toward the support of the earl's domestics. The
sight of that long series of historic rooms, full of
such splendors and rarities as a great English family
necessarily gathers about itself in its hereditary
abode, and in the lapse of ages, is well worth the
money, or ten times as much, if indeed the value of
the spectacle could be reckoned in money's-worth.
But after the attendanthas hurried you from end to end of
the edifice, repeating a guide-book by rote, and
exorcising each successive hall of its poetic glamour
and witchcraft by the mere tone in which he talks
about it, you will make the doleful discovery that
Warwick Castle has ceased to be a dream. It is better,
methinks, to linger on the bridge, gazing at
Cæsar's Tower and Guy's Tower, in the
dim English sunshine above, and in the placid Avon
below, and still keep them as thoughts in your own
mind, than climb to their summits, or touch even a
stone of their actual substance. They will have all
the more reality for you, as stalwart relics of
immemorial time, if you are reverent enough to leave
them in the intangible sanctity of a poetic vision.

From the bridge over the Avon, the road passes in
front of the castle-gate, and soon enters the
principal street of Warwick, a little beyond St.
John's School-House, already described. Chester
itself, most antique of English towns, can hardly show
quainter architectural shapes than many of the
buildings that border this street. They are mostly of
the timber-and-plaster kind, with bowed and decrepit
ridge-poles, and a whole chronology of various
patchwork in their walls; their low-browed doorways
open upon a sunken floor; their projecting stories
peep, as it were, over one another's shoulders,
and rise into a multiplicity of peaked gables; they
have curious windows, breaking out irregularly all
over the house, some even in the roof, set in their
own little peaks, opening lattice-wise, and furnished
with twenty small panes of lozenge-shaped glass. The
architecture of these edifices (a visible oaken
framework, showing the whole skeleton of the
house,--as if a man's bones should be arranged on
his outside, and his flesh seen through the
interstices) isoften
imitated by modern builders, and with sufficiently
picturesque effect. The objection is, that such
houses, like all imitations of by-gone styles, have an
air of affectation; they do not seem to be built in
earnest; they are no better than playthings, or
overgrown baby-houses, in which nobody should be
expected to encounter the serious realities of either
birth or death. Besides, originating nothing, we leave
no fashions for another age to copy, when we ourselves
shall have grown antique.

Old as it looks, all this portion of Warwick has
over-brimmed, as it were, from the original
settlement, being outside of the ancient wall. The
street soon runs under an arched gateway, with a
church or some other venerable structure above it, and
admits us into the heart of the town. At one of my
first visits, I witnessed a military display. A
regiment of Warwickshire militia, probably commanded
by the Earl, was going through its drill in the
market-place; and on the collar of one of the officers
was embroidered the Bear and Ragged Staff, which has
been the cognizance of the Warwick earldom from time
immemorial. The soldiers were sturdy young men, with
the simple, stolid, yet kindly, faces of English
rustics, looking exceedingly well in a body, but
slouching into a yeomanlike carriage and appearance
the moment they were dismissed from drill. Squads of
them were distributed everywhere about the streets,
and sentinels were posted at various points; and I saw
a sergeant, with a great key in his hand (big enough
to have been the key of the castle's main
entrance when the gate was thickest and heaviest)
apparently setting a guard. Thus, centuries after
feudal times are past, we find warriors still
gathering under the old castle-walls, andcommanded by a feudal lord, just as
in the days of the King-Maker, who, no doubt, often
mustered his retainers in the same market-place where
I beheld this modern regiment.

The interior of the town wears a less old-fashioned
aspect than the suburbs through which we approach it;
and the High Street has shops with modern plate-glass,
and buildings with stuccoed fronts, exhibiting as few
projections to hang a thought or sentiment upon as if
an architect of today had planned them. And, indeed,
so far as their surface goes, they are perhaps new
enough to stand unabashed in an American street; but
behind these renovated faces, with their monotonous
lack of expression, there is probably the substance of
the same old town that wore a Gothic exterior in the
Middle Ages. The street is an emblem of England
itself. What seems new in it is chiefly a skilful and
fortunate adaptation of what such a people as
ourselves would destroy. The new things are based and
supported on sturdy old things, and derive a massive
strength from their deep and immemorial foundations,
though with such limitations and impediments as only
an Englishman could endure. But he likes to feel the
weight of all the past upon his back; and, moreover,
the antiquity that overburdens him has taken root in
his being, and has grown to be rather a hump than a
pack, so that there is no getting rid of it without
tearing his whole structure to pieces. In my
judgment, as he appears to be sufficiently comfortable
under the mouldy accretion, he had better stumble on
with it as long as he can. He presents a spectacle
which is by no means without its charm for a
disinterested and unencumbered observer.

When the old edifice, or the antiquated custom orinstitution, appears in
its pristine form, without any attempt at
intermarrying it with modern fashions, an American
cannot but admire the picturesque effect produced by
the sudden cropping up of an apparently
dead-and-buried state of society into the actual
present, of which he is himself a part. We need not go
far in Warwick without encountering an instance of the
kind. Proceeding westward through the town, we find
ourselves confronted by a huge mass of natural rock,
hewn into something like architectural shape, and
penetrated by a vaulted passage, which may well have
been one of King Cymbeline's original gateways;
and on the top of the rock, over the archway, sits a
small old church, communicating with an ancient
edifice, or assemblage of edifices, that look down
from a similar elevation on the side of the street. A
range of trees half hides the latter establishment
from the sun. It presents a curious and venerable
specimen of the timber-and-plaster style of building,
in which some of the finest old houses in England are
constructed: the front projects into porticos and
vestibules, and rises into many gables, some in a row,
and others crowning semi-detached portions of the
structure; the windows mostly open on hinges, but show
a delightful irregularity of shape and position; a
multiplicity of chimneys break through the roof at
their own will, or, at least, without any settled
purpose of the architect. The whole affair looks very
old,--so old indeed that the front bulges forth, as if
the timber framework were a little weary, at last, of
standing erect so long; but the state of repair is so
perfect, and there is such an indescribable aspect of
continuous vitality within the system of this aged
house, that you feel confident that there may be
safeshelter yet, and
perhaps for centuries to come, under its time-honored
roof. And on a bench, sluggishly enjoying the
sunshine, and looking into the street of Warwick as
from a life apart, a few old men are generally to be
seen, wrapped in long cloaks, on which you may detect
the glistening of a silver badge representing the Bear
and Ragged Staff. These decorated worthies are some of
the twelve brethren of Leicester's Hospital,--a
community which subsists to-day under the identical
modes that were established for it in the reign of
Queen Elizabeth, and of course retains many features
of a social life that has vanished almost everywhere
else.

The edifice itself dates from a much older period
than the charitable institution of which it is now the
home. It was the seat of a religious fraternity far
back in the Middle Ages, and continued so till Henry
VIII. turned all the priesthood of England out of
doors, and put the most unscrupulous of his favorites
into their vacant abodes. In many instances, the old
monks had chosen the sites of their domiciles so well,
and built them on such a broad system of beauty and
convenience, that their lay-occupants found it easy to
convert them into stately and comfortable homes; and
as such they still exist, with something of the
antique reverence lingering about them. The structure
now before us seems to have been first granted to Sir
Nicholas Lestrange, who perhaps intended, like other
men, to establish his household gods in the niches
whence he had thrown down the images of saints, and to
lay his hearth where an altar had stood. But there was
probably a natural reluctance in those days (when
Catholicism, so lately repudiated, must needs have
retained an influence over all but the most obduratecharacters) to bring
one's hopes of domestic prosperity and a
fortunate lineage into direct hostility with the awful
claims of the ancient religion. At all events, there
is still a superstitious idea, betwixt a fantasy and a
belief, that the possession of former Church-property
has drawn a curse along with it, not only among the
posterity of those to whom it was originally granted,
but wherever it has subsequently been transferred,
even if honestly bought and paid for. There are
families, now inhabiting some of the beautiful old
abbeys, who appear to indulge a species of pride in
recording the strange deaths and ugly shapes of
misfortune that have occurred among their
predecessors, and may be supposed likely to dog their
own pathway down the ages of futurity. Whether Sir
Nicholas Lestrange, in the beef-eating days of Old
Harry and Elizabeth, was a nervous man, and subject to
apprehensions of this kind, I cannot tell; but it is
certain that he speedily rid himself of the spoils of
the Church, and that, within twenty years afterwards,
the edifice became the property of the famous Dudley,
Earl of Leicester, brother of the Earl of Warwick. He
devoted the ancient religious precinct to a charitable
use, endowing it with an ample revenue, and making it
the perpetual home of twelve poor, honest, and
war-broken soldiers, mostly his own retainers, and
natives either of Warwickshire or Gloucestershire.
These veterans, or others wonderfully like them, still
occupy their monkish dormitories, and haunt the
time-darkened corridors and galleries of the hospital,
leading a life of old-fashioned comfort, wearing the
old-fashioned cloaks, and burnishing the identical
silver badges which the Earl of Leicester gave to the
original twelve. He is said to have been a bad man in
his day; but hehas
succeeded in prolonging one good deed into what was to
him a distant future.

On the projecting story, over the arched entrance,
there is the date, 1571, and several coats-of-arms,
either the Earl's or those of his kindred, and
immediately above the doorway a stone sculpture of the
Bear and Ragged Staff.

Passing through the arch, we find ourselves in a
quadrangle, or enclosed court, such as always formed
the central part of a great family residence in Queen
Elizabeth's time, and earlier. There can hardly
be a more perfect specimen of such an establishment
than Leicester's Hospital. The quadrangle is a
sort of sky-roofed hall, to which there is convenient
access from all parts of the house. The four inner
fronts, with their high, steep roofs and sharp gables,
look into it from antique windows, and through open
corridors and galleries along the sides; and there
seems to be a richer display of architectural devices
and ornaments, quainter carvings in oak, and more
fantastic shapes of the timber framework, than on the
side toward the street. On the wall opposite the
arched entrance are the following inscriptions,
comprising such moral rules, I presume, as were deemed
most essential for the daily observance of the
community: "HONOR ALL
MEN"--"FEAR
GOD"--"HONOR THE
KING"--"LOVE THE
BROTHERHOOD"; and again, as if this latter
injunction needed emphasis and repetition among a
household of aged people soured with the hard fortune
of their previous lives,--"BE KINDLY AFFECTIONED ONE
TO ANOTHER." One sentence, over a door communicating
with the Master's side of the house, is addressed to
that dignitary,--"HE THAT RULETH OVER MEN MUST BE
JUST." All these are charactered in old English
letters, and form part ofthe elaborate ornamentation of the
house. Everywhere--on the walls, over windows and
doors, and at all points where there is room to place
them--appear escutcheons of arms, cognizances, and
crests, emblazoned in their proper colors, and
illuminating the ancient quadrangle with their
splendor. One of these devices is a large image of a
porcupine on an heraldic wreath, being the crest of
the Lords de Lisle. But especially is the cognizance
of the Bear and Ragged Staff repeated over and over,
and over again and again, in a great variety of
attitudes,--at full-length and half-length, in paint
and in oaken sculpture, in bas-relief and rounded
image. The founder of the hospital was certainly
disposed to reckon his own beneficence as among the
hereditary glories of his race; and had he lived and
died a half-century earlier, he would have kept up an
old Catholic custom, by enjoining the twelve bedesmen
to pray for the welfare of his soul.

At my first visit, some of the brethren were seated
on the bench outside of the edifice, looking down into
the street; but they did not vouchsafe me a word, and
seemed so estranged from modern life, so enveloped in
antique customs and old-fashioned cloaks, that to
converse with them would have been like shouting
across the gulf between our age and Queen Elizabeth's.
So I passed into the quadrangle, and found it quite
solitary, except that a plain and neat old woman
happened to be crossing it, with an aspect of business
and carefulness that bespoke her a woman of this
world, and not merely a shadow of the past. Asking her
if I could come in, she answered very readily and
civilly that I might, and said that I was free to look
about me, hinting a hope, however, that I would not
open the private doors of the brotherhood, as somevisitors were in the
habit of doing. Under her guidance, I went into what
was formerly the great hall of the establishment,
where King James I. had once been feasted by an Earl
of Warwick, as is commemorated by an inscription on
the cobwebbed and dingy wall. It is a very spacious
and barn-like apartment, with a brick floor, and a
vaulted roof, the rafters of which are oaken beams,
wonderfully carved, but hardly visible in the
duskiness that broods aloft. The hall may have made a
splendid appearance, when it was decorated with rich
tapestry, and illuminated with chandeliers, cressets,
and torches glistening upon silver dishes, where King
James sat at supper among his brilliantly dressed
nobles; but it has come to base uses in these latter
days,--being improved, in Yankee phrase, as a brewery
and wash-room, and as a cellar for the brethren's
separate allotments of coal.

The old lady here left me to myself, and I returned
into the quadrangle. It was very quiet, very handsome,
in its own obsolete style, and must be an exceedingly
comfortable place for the old people to lounge in,
when the inclement winds render it inexpedient to walk
abroad. There are shrubs against the wall, on one
side; and on another is a cloistered walk, adorned
with stags' heads and antlers, and running
beneath a covered gallery, up to which ascends a
balustraded staircase. In the portion of the edifice
opposite the entrance-arch are the apartments of the
Master; and looking into the window (as the old woman,
at no request of mine, had specially informed me that
I might), I saw a low, but vastly comfortable parlor,
very handsomely furnished, and altogether a luxurious
place. It had a fireplace with an immense arch, the
antique breadth of which extended almost fromwall to wall of the
room, though now fitted up in such a way, that the
modern coal-grate looked very diminutive in the midst.
Gazing into this pleasant interior, it seemed to me,
that, among these venerable surroundings, availing
himself of whatever was good in former things, and
eking out their imperfection with the results of
modern ingenuity, the Master might lead a not
unenviable life. On the cloistered side of the
quadrangle, where the dark oak panels made the
enclosed space dusky, I beheld a curtained window
reddened by a great blaze from within, and heard the
bubbling and squeaking of something--doubtless very
nice and succulent--that was being cooked at the
kitchen-fire. I think, indeed, that a whiff or two of
the savory fragrance reached my nostrils; at all
events, the impression grew upon me that
Leicester's Hospital is one of the jolliest old
domiciles in England.

I was about to depart, when another old woman, very
plainly dressed, but fat, comfortable, and with a
cheerful twinkle in her eyes, came in through the
arch, and looked curiously at me. This repeated
apparition of the gentle sex (though by no means under
its loveliest guise) had still an agreeable effect in
modifying my ideas of an institution which I had
supposed to be of a stern and monastic character. She
asked whether I wished to see the hospital, and said
that the porter, whose office it was to attend to
visitors, was dead, and would be buried that very day,
so that the whole establishment could not conveniently
be shown me. She kindly invited me, however, to visit
the apartment occupied by her husband and herself; so
I followed her up the antique staircase, along the
gallery, and into a small, oak-panelled parlor, where
sat an old man in a long blue garment, who arose andsaluted me with much
courtesy. He seemed a very quiet person, and yet had a
look of travel and adventure, and gray experience,
such as I could have fancied in a palmer of ancient
times, who might likewise have worn a similar costume.
The little room was carpeted and neatly furnished; a
portrait of its occupant was hanging on the wall; and
on a table were two swords crossed,--one, probably,
his own battle-weapon, and the other, which I drew
half out of the scabbard, had an inscription on the
blade, purporting that it had been taken from the
field of Waterloo. My kind old hostess was anxious to
exhibit all the particulars of their housekeeping, and
led me into the bedroom, which was in the nicest
order, with a snow-white quilt upon the bed; and in a
little intervening room was a washing and bathing
apparatus; a convenience (judging from the personal
aspect and atmosphere of such parties) seldom to be
met with in the humbler ranks of British life.

The old soldier and his wife both seemed glad of
somebody to talk with; but the good woman availed
herself of the privilege far more copiously than the
veteran himself, insomuch that he felt it expedient to
give her an occasional nudge with his elbow in her
well-padded ribs. "Don't you be so
talkative!" quoth he; and, indeed, he could
hardly find space for a word, and quite as little
after his admonition as before. Her nimble tongue ran
over the whole system of life in the hospital. The
brethren, she said, had a yearly stipend (the amount
of which she did not mention), and such decent
lodgings as I saw, and some other advantages, free;
and, instead of being pestered with a great many
rules, and made to dine together at a great table,
they could manage their little household matters as
theyliked, buying
their own dinners, and having them cooked in the
general kitchen, and eating them snugly in their own
parlors. "And," added she, rightly deeming
this the crowning privilege, "with the Master's
permission, they can have their wives to take care of
them; and no harm comes of it; and what more can an
old man desire?" It was evident enough that the
good dame found herself in what she considered very
rich clover, and, moreover, had plenty of small
occupations to keep her from getting rusty and dull;
but the veteran impressed me as deriving far less
enjoyment from the monotonous ease, without fear of
change or hope of improvement, that had followed upon
thirty years of peril and vicissitude. I fancied, too,
that, while pleased with the novelty of a
stranger's visit, he was still a little shy of
becoming a spectacle for the stranger's
curiosity; for, if he chose to be morbid about the
matter, the establishment was but an almshouse, in
spite of its old-fashioned magnificence, and his fine
blue cloak only a pauper's garment with a silver
badge on it that perhaps galled his shoulder. In
truth, the badge and the peculiar garb, though quite
in accordance with the manners of the Earl of
Leicester's age, are repugnant to modern
prejudices, and might fitly and humanely be abolished.

A year or two afterwards I paid another visit to
the hospital, and found a new porter established in
office, and already capable of talking like a
guide-book about the history, antiquities, and present
condition of the charity. He informed me that the
twelve brethren are selected from among old soldiers
of good character, whose other resources must not
exceed an income of five pounds; thus excluding all
commissioned officers, whose half-pay would of course
be more thanthat
amount. They receive from the hospital an annuity of
eighty pounds each, besides their apartments, a
garment of fine blue cloth, an annual abundance of
ale, and a privilege at the kitchen-fire; so that,
considering the class from which they are taken, they
may well reckon themselves among the fortunate of the
earth. Furthermore, they are invested with political
rights, acquiring a vote for member of Parliament in
virtue either of their income or brotherhood. On the
other hand, as regards their personal freedom or
conduct, they are subject to a supervision which the
Master of the hospital might render extremely
annoying, were he so inclined; but the military
restraint under which they have spent the active
portion of their lives makes it easier for them to
endure the domestic discipline here imposed upon their
age. The porter bore his testimony (whatever were its
value) to their being as contented and happy as such a
set of old people could possibly be, and affirmed that
they spent much time in burnishing their silver
badges, and were as proud of them as a nobleman of his
star. These badges, by the by, except one that was
stolen and replaced in Queen Anne's time, are the very
same that decorated the original twelve brethren.

I have seldom met with a better guide than my
friend the porter. He appeared to take a genuine
interest in the peculiarities of the establishment,
and yet had an existence apart from them, so that he
could the better estimate what those peculiarities
were. To be sure, his knowledge and observation were
confined to external things, but, so far, had a
sufficiently extensive scope. He led me up the
staircase and exhibited portions of the timber
framework of the edifice that are reckoned to be eight
or nine hundred years old,and are still neither worm-eaten
nor decayed; and traced out what had been a great hall
in the days of the Catholic fraternity, though its
area is now filled up with the apartments of the
twelve brethren; and pointed to ornaments of
sculptured oak, done in an ancient religious style of
art, but hardly visible amid the vaulted dimness of
the roof. Thence we went to the chapel--the Gothic
church which I noted several pages back--surmounting
the gateway that stretches half across the street.
Here the brethren attend daily prayer, and have each a
prayer-book of the finest paper, with a fair, large
type for their old eyes. The interior of the chapel is
very plain, with a picture of no merit for an
altar-piece, and a single old pane of painted glass in
the great eastern window, representing,--no saint, nor
angel, as is customary in such cases,--but that grim
sinner, the Earl of Leicester. Nevertheless, amid so
many tangible proofs of his human sympathy, one comes
to doubt whether the Earl could have been such a
hardened reprobate, after all.

We ascended the tower of the chapel, and looked
down between its battlements into the street, a
hundred feet below us; while clambering half-way up
were foxglove-flowers, weeds, small shrubs, and tufts
of grass, that had rooted themselves into the
roughnesses of the stone foundation. Far around us lay
a rich and lovely English landscape, with many a
church-spire and noble country-seat, and several
objects of high historic interest. Edge Hill, where
the Puritans defeated Charles I., is in sight on the
edge of the horizon, and much nearer stands the house
where Cromwell lodged on the night before the battle.
Right under our eyes, and half enveloping the town
with its high-shouldering wall, so that all the
closelycompacted
streets seemed but a precinct of the estate, was the
Earl of Warwick's delightful park, a wide extent
of sunny lawns, interspersed with broad contiguities
of forest-shade. Some of the cedars of Lebanon were
there,--a growth of trees in which the Warwick family
take an hereditary pride. The two highest towers of
the castle heave themselves up out of a mass of
foliage, and look down in a lordly manner upon the
plebeian roofs of the town, a part of which are
slate-covered (these are the modern houses), and a
part are coated with old red tiles, denoting the more
ancient edifices. A hundred and sixty or seventy years
ago, a great fire destroyed a considerable portion of
the town, and doubtless annihilated many structures of
a remote antiquity; at least, there was a possibility
of very old houses in the long past of Warwick, which
King Cymbeline is said to have founded in the year
ONE
of the Christian era!

And this historic fact or poetic fiction, whichever
it may be, brings to mind a more indestructible
reality than anything else that has occurred within
the present field of our vision; though this includes
the scene of Guy of Warwick's legendary exploits,
and some of those of the Round Table, to say nothing
of the Battle of Edge Hill. For perhaps it was in time
landscape now under our eyes that Posthumus wandered
with the King's daughter, the sweet, chaste,
faithful, and courageous Imogen, the tenderest and
womanliest woman that Shakespeare ever made immortal
in the world. The silver Avon, which we see flowing
so quietly by the gray castle, may have held their
images in its bosom.

The day, though it began brightly, had long been
overcast, and the clouds now spat down a few
spitefuldrops upon
us, besides that the cast-wind was very chill; so we
descended the winding tower-stair, and went next into
the garden, one side of which is shut in by almost the
only remaining portion of the old city-wall. A part of
the garden-ground is devoted to grass and shrubbery,
and permeated by gravel-walks, in the centre of one of
which is a beautiful stone vase of Egyptian sculpture,
that formerly stood on the top of a Nilometer, or
graduated pillar for measuring the rise and fall of
the river Nile. On the pedestal is a Latin inscription
by Dr. Parr, who (his vicarage of Hatton being so
close at hand) was probably often the Master's
guest, and smoked his interminable pipe along these
garden-walks. Of the vegetable-garden, which lies
adjacent, the lion's share is appropriated to the
Master, and twelve small, separate patches to the
individual brethren, who cultivate them at their own
judgment and by their own labor; and their beans and
cauliflowers have a better flavor, I doubt not, than
if they had received them directly from the dead hand
of the Earl of Leicester, like the rest of their food.
In the farther part of the garden is an arbor for the
old men's pleasure and convenience, and I should
like well to sit down among them there, and find out
what is really the bitter and the sweet of such a sort
of life. As for the old gentlemen themselves, they put
me queerly in mind of the Salem Custom House, and the
venerable personages whom I found so quietly at anchor
there.

The Master's residence, forming one entire
side of the quadrangle, fronts on the garden, and
wears an aspect at once stately and homely. It can
hardly have undergone any perceptible change within
three centuries; but the garden, into which its old
windowslook has
probably put off a great many eccentricities and
quaintnesses, in the way of cunningly clipped
shrubbery, since the gardener of Queen
Elizabeth's reign threw down his rusty shears and
took his departure. The present Master's name is
Harris; he is a descendant of the founder's
family, a gentleman of independent fortune, and a
clergyman of the Established Church, as the
regulations of the hospital require him to be. I know
not what are his official emoluments; but, according
to all English precedent, an ancient charitable fund
is certain to be held directly for the behoof of those
who administer it, and perhaps incidentally, in a
moderate way, for the nominal beneficiaries; and, in
the case before us, the twelve brethren being so
comfortably provided for, the Master is likely to be
at least as comfortable as all the twelve together.
Yet I ought not, even in a distant land, to fling an
idle gibe against a gentleman of whom I really know
nothing, except that the people under his charge bear
all possible tokens of being tended and cared for as
sedulously as if each of them sat by a warm fireside
of his own, with a daughter bustling round the hearth
to make ready his porridge and his titbits. It is
delightful to think of the good life which a suitable
man, in the Master's position, has an opportunity
to lead,--linked to time-honored customs, welded in
with an ancient system, never dreaming of radical
change, and bringing all the mellowness and richness
of the past down into these railway-days, which do not
compel him or his community to move a whit quicker
than of yore. Everybody can appreciate the advantages
of going ahead; it might be well, sometimes, to think
whether there is not a word or two to be said in favor
of standing still or going to sleep.

From the garden we went into the kitchen, where the
fire was burning hospitably, and diffused a genial
warmth far and wide, together with the fragrance of
some old English roast-beef, which, I think, must at
that moment have been done nearly to a turn. The
kitchen is a lofty, spacious, and noble room,
partitioned off round the fireplace, by a sort of
semicircular oaken screen, or rather, an arrangement
of heavy and high-backed settles, with an ever-open
entrance between them, on either side of which is the
omnipresent image of the Bear and Ragged Staff, three
feet high, and excellently carved in oak, now black
with time and unctuous kitchen-smoke. The ponderous
mantel-piece, likewise of carved oak, towers high
towards the dusky ceiling, and extends its mighty
breadth to take in a vast area of hearth, the arch of
the fireplace being positively so immense that I could
compare it to nothing but the city gateway. Above its
cavernous opening were crossed two ancient halberds,
the weapons, possibly, of soldiers who had fought
under Leicester in the Low Countries; and elsewhere on
the walls were displayed several muskets, which some
of the present inmates of the hospital may have
levelled against the French. Another ornament of the
mantel-piece was a square of silken needlework or
embroidery, faded nearly white, but dimly representing
that wearisome Bear and Ragged Staff, which we should
hardly look twice at, only that it was wrought by the
fair fingers of poor Amy Robsart, and beautifully
framed in oak from Kenilworth Castle, at the expense
of a Mr. Conner, a countryman of our own. Certainly,
no Englishman would be capable of this little bit of
enthusiasm. Finally, the kitchen-firelight glistens on
a splendid display of copperflagons, all of generous capacity,
and one of them about as big as a half-barrel; the
smaller vessels contain the customary allowance of
ale, and the larger one is filled with that foaming
liquor on four festive occasions of the year, and
emptied amain by the jolly brotherhood. I should be
glad to see them do it; but it would be an exploit
fitter for Queen Elizabeth's age than these
degenerate times.

The kitchen is the social hall of the twelve
brethren. In the daytime, they bring their little
messes to be cooked here, and eat them in their own
parlors; but after a certain hour, the great hearth is
cleared and swept, and the old men assemble round its
blaze, each with his tankard and his pipe, and hold
high converse through the evening. If the Master be a
fit man for his office, methinks he will sometimes sit
down sociably among them; for there is an elbow-chair
by the fireside which it would not demean his dignity
to fill, since it was occupied by King James at the
great festival of nearly three centuries ago. A sip of
the ale and a whiff of the tobacco-pipe would put him
in friendly relations with his venerable household;
and then we can fancy him instructing them by pithy
apothegms and religious texts, which were first
uttered here by some Catholic priest and have
impregnated the atmosphere ever since. If a joke goes
round, it shall be of an elder coinage than Joe
Miller's, as old as Lord Bacon's collection,
or as the jest-book that Master Slender asked for when
he lacked small-talk for sweet Anne Page. No news
shall be spoken of, later than the drifting ashore, on
the northern coast, of some stern-post or figure-head,
a barnacled fragment of one of the great galleons of
the Spanish Armada. What a tremor would pass through
theantique group,
if a damp newspaper should
suddenly be spread to dry before the fire! They would
feel as if either that printed sheet or they
themselves must be an unreality. What a mysterious
awe, if the shriek of the railway-train, as it reaches
the Warwick station, should ever so faintly invade
their ears! Movement of any kind seems inconsistent
with the stability of such an institution.
Nevertheless, I trust that the ages will carry it
along with them; because it is such a pleasant kind of
dream for an American to find his way thither, and
behold a piece of the sixteenth century set into our
prosaic times, and then to depart, and think of its
arched doorway as a spell-guarded entrance which will
never be accessible or visible to him any more.

Not far from the market-place of Warwick stands the
great church of St. Mary's: a vast edifice,
indeed, and almost worthy to be a cathedral. People
who pretend to skill in such matters say that it is in
a poor style of architecture, though designed (or, at
least, extensively restored) by Sir Christopher Wren;
but I thought it very striking, with its wide, high,
and elaborate windows, its tall towers, its immense
length, and (for it was long before I outgrew this
Americanism, the love of an old thing merely for the
sake of its age) the tinge of gray antiquity over the
whole. Once, while I stood gazing up at the tower, the
clock struck twelve with a very deep intonation, and
immediately some chimes began to play, and kept up
their resounding music for five minutes, as measured
by the hand upon the dial. It was a very delightful
harmony, as airy as the notes of birds, and seemed a
not unbecoming freak of half-sportive fancy in the
huge, ancient, and solemn church; although I have seen
anold-fashioned
parlor-clock that did precisely the same thing, in its
small way.

The great attraction of this edifice is the
Beauchamp (or, as the English, who delight in
vulgarizing their fine old Norman names, call it, the
Beechum) Chapel, where the Earls of Warwick and their
kindred have been buried, from four hundred years back
till within a recent period. It is a stately and very
elaborate chapel, with a large window of ancient
painted glass, as perfectly preserved as any that I
remember seeing in England, and remarkably vivid in
its colors. Here are several monuments with marble
figures recumbent upon them, representing the Earls in
their knightly armor, and their dames in the ruffs and
court-finery of their day, looking hardly stiffer in
stone than they must needs have been in their starched
linen and embroidery. The renowned Earl of Leicester
of Queen Elizabeth's time, the benefactor of the
hospital, reclines at full length on the tablet of one
of these tombs, side by side with his Countess,--not
Amy Robsart, but a lady who (unless I have confused
the story with some other mouldy scandal) is said to
have avenged poor Amy's murder by poisoning the
Earl himself. Be that as it may, both figures, and
especially the Earl, look like the very types of
ancient Honor and Conjugal Faith. In consideration of
his long-enduring kindness to the twelve brethren, I
cannot consent to believe him as wicked as he is
usually depicted; and it seems a marvel, now that so
many well-established historical verdicts have been
reversed, why some enterprising writer does not make
out Leicester to have been the pattern nobleman of his
age.

In the centre of the chapel is the magnificent
memorial of its founder, Richard Beauchamp, Earl ofWarwick in the time of
Henry VI. On a richly ornamented altar-tomb of gray
marble lies the bronze figure of a knight in gilded
armor, most admirably executed: for the sculptors of
those days had wonderful skill in their own style, and
could make so life-like an image of a warrior, in
brass or marble, that, if a trumpet were sounded over
his tomb, you would expect him to start up and handle
his sword. The Earl whom we now speak of, however, has
slept soundly in spite of a more serious disturbance
than any blast of a trumpet, unless it were the final
one. Some centuries after his death, the floor of the
chapel fell down and broke open the stone coffin in
which he was buried; and among the fragments appeared
the anciently entombed Earl of Warwick, with the color
scarcely faded out of his cheeks, his eyes a little
sunken, but in other respects looking as natural as if
he had died yesterday. But exposure to the atmosphere
appeared to begin and finish the long-delayed process
of decay in a moment, causing him to vanish like a
bubble; so that, almost before there had been time to
wonder at him, there was nothing left of the stalwart
Earl save his hair. This sole relic the ladies of
Warwick made prize of, and braided it into rings and
brooches for their own adornment; and thus, with a
chapel and a ponderous tomb built on purpose to
protect his remains, this great nobleman could not
help being brought untimely to the light of day, nor
even keep his lovelocks on his skull after he had so
long done with love. There seems to be a fatality
that disturbs people in their sepulchres, when they
have been over-careful to render them magnificent and
impregnable,--as witness the builders of the Pyramids,
and Hadrian, Augustus, and the Scipios, and most other
personageswhose
mausoleums have been conspicuous enough to attract the
violator; and as for dead men's hair, I have seen
a lock of King Edward the Fourth's, of a
reddish-brown color, which perhaps was once twisted
round the delicate forefinger of Mistress Shore.

The direct lineage of the renowned characters that
lie buried in this splendid chapel has long been
extinct. The earldom is now held by the Grevilles,
descendants of the Lord Brooke who was slain in the
Parliamentary War; and they have recently (that is to
say, within a century) built a burial-vault on the
other side of the church, calculated (as the sexton
assured me, with a nod as if he were pleased) to
afford suitable and respectful accommodation to as
many as fourscore coffins. Thank Heaven, the old man
did not call them
"CASKETS"!--a vile modern
phrase, which compels a person of sense and good taste
to shrink more disgustfully than ever before from the
idea of being buried at all. But as regards those
eighty coffins, only sixteen have as yet been
contributed; and it may be a question with some minds,
not merely whether the Grevilles will hold the earldom
of Warwick until the full number shall be made up, but
whether earldoms and all manner of lordships will not
have faded out of England long before those many
generations shall have passed from the castle to the
vault. I hope not. A titled and landed aristocracy, if
anywise an evil and an encumbrance, is so only to the
nation which is doomed to bear it on its shoulders;
and an American, whose sole relation to it is to
admire its picturesque effect upon society, ought to
be the last man to quarrel with what affords him so
much gratuitous enjoyment. Nevertheless, conservative
as England is, and though I scarce ever found
anEnglishman
who seemed really to desire change,
there was continually a dull sound in my ears as if
the old foundations of things were crumbling away.
Some time or other,--by no irreverent effort of
violence, but, rather, in spite of all pious efforts
to uphold a heterogeneous pile of institutions that
will have outlasted their vitality,--at some
unexpected moment, there must come a terrible crash.
The sole reason why I should desire it to happen in my
day is, that I might be there to see! But the ruin of
my own country is, perhaps, all that I am destined to
witness; and that immense catastrophe (though I am
strong in the faith that there is a national lifetime
of a thousand years in us yet) would serve any man
well enough as his final spectacle on earth.

If the visitor is inclined to carry away any little
memorial of Warwick, he had better go to an Old
Curiosity Shop in the High Street, where there is a
vast quantity of obsolete gewgaws, great and small,
and many of them so pretty and ingenious that you
wonder how they came to be thrown aside and forgotten.
As regards its minor tastes, the world changes, but
does not improve; it appears to me, indeed, that there
have been epochs of far more exquisite fancy than the
present one, in matters of personal ornament, and such
delicate trifles as we put upon a drawing-room table,
a mantel-piece, or a what-not. The shop in question is
near the East Gate, but is hardly to be found without
careful search, being denoted only by the name of
"REDFERN," painted not very conspicuously in
the top-light of the door. Immediately on entering, we
find ourselves among a confusion of old rubbish and
valuables, ancient armor, historic portraits, ebony
cabinets inlaid with pearl, tall, ghostly clocks,
hideous old china,dim looking-glasses in frames of
tarnished magnificence,--a thousand objects of strange
aspect, and others that almost frighten you by their
likeness in unlikeness to things now in use. It is
impossible to give an idea of the variety of articles,
so thickly strewn about that we can scarcely move
without overthrowing some great curiosity with a
crash, or sweeping away some small one hitched to our
sleeves. Three stories of the entire house are crowded
in like manner. The collection even as we see it
exposed to view, must have been got together at great
cost; but the real treasures of the establishment lie
in secret repositories, whence they are not likely to
be drawn forth at an ordinary summons; though, if a
gentleman with a competently long purse should call
for them, I doubt not that the signet-ring of
Joseph's friend Pharaoh, or the Duke of
Alva's leading staff, or the dagger that killed
the Duke of Buckingham (all of which I have seen), or
any other almost incredible thing, might make its
appearance. Gold snuff-boxes, antique gems, jewelled
goblets, Venetian wine-glasses (which burst when
poison is poured into them, and therefore must not be
used for modern wine-drinking), jasper-handled knives,
painted Sêvres teacups,--in short, there are all
sorts of things that a virtuoso ransacks the world to
discover.

It would be easier to spend a hundred pounds in Mr.
Redfern's shop than to keep the money in
one's pocket; but, for my part, I contented
myself with buying a little old spoon of silver gilt,
and fantastically shaped, and got it at all the more
reasonable rate because there happened to be no legend
attached to it. I could supply any deficiency of that
kind at much less expense than regilding the spoon!

RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN.

FROM Leamington to Stratford-on-Avon the distance
is eight or nine miles, over a road that seemed to me
most beautiful. Not that I can recall any memorable
peculiarities; for the country, most of the way, is a
succession of the gentlest swells and subsidences,
affording wide and far glimpses of champaign scenery
here and there, and sinking almost to a dead level as
we draw near Stratford. Any landscape in New England,
even the tamest, has a more striking outline, and,
besides, would have its blue eyes open in those
lakelets that we encounter almost from mile to mile at
home, but of which the Old Country is utterly
destitute; or it would smile in our faces through the
medium of the wayside brooks that vanish under a low
stone arch on one side of the road, and sparkle out
again on the other. Neither of these pretty features
is often to be found in an English scene. The charm of
the latter consists in the rich verdure of the fields,
in the stately wayside trees and carefully kept
plantations of wood, and in the old and high
cultivation that has humanized the very sods by
mingling so much of man's toil and care among
them. To an American there is a kind of sanctity even
in an English turnip-field, when he thinks how long
that small square of ground has been known and
recognized as a possession, transmitted from father to
son, trodden often by memorable feet, and utterly
redeemed from savagery by old acquaintanceship with
civilized eyes.The
wildest things in England are more than half tame. The
trees, for instance, whether in hedge-row, park, or
what they call forest, have nothing wild about them.
They are never ragged; there is a certain decorous
restraint in the freest outspread of their branches,
though they spread wider than any self-nurturing tree;
they are tall, vigorous, bulky, with a look of
age-long life, and a promise of more years to come,
all of which will bring them into closer kindred with
the race of man. Somebody or other has known them from
the sapling upward; and if they endure long enough,
they grow to be traditionally observed and honored,
and connected with the fortunes of old families, till,
like Tennyson's Talking Oak, they babble with a
thousand leafy tongues to ears that can understand
them.

An American tree, however, if it could grow in fair
competition with an English one of similar species,
would probably be the more picturesque object of the
two. The Warwickshire elm has not so beautiful a shape
as those that overhang our village street; and as for
the redoubtable English oak, there is a certain John
Bullism in its figure, a compact rotundity of foliage,
a lack of irregular and various outline, that make it
look wonderfully like a gigantic cauliflower. Its
leaf, too, is much smaller than that of most varieties
of American oak; nor do I mean to doubt that the
latter, with free leave to grow, reverent care and
cultivation, and immunity from the axe, would live out
its centuries as sturdily as its English brother, and
prove far the nobler and more majestic specimen of a
tree at the end of them. Still, however one's
Yankee patriotism may struggle against the admission,
it must be owned that the trees and other objects of
anEnglish landscape
take hold of the observer by numberless minute
tendrils, as it were, which, look as closely as we
choose, we never find in an American scene. The
parasitic growth is so luxuriant, that the trunk of
the tree, so gray and dry in our climate, is better
worth observing than the boughs and foliage; a verdant
mossiness coats it all over; so that it looks almost
as green as the leaves; and often, moreover, the
stately stem is clustered about, high upward, with
creeping and twining shrubs, the ivy, and sometimes
the mistletoe, close-clinging friends, nurtured by the
moisture and never too fervid sunshine, and supporting
themselves by the old tree's abundant strength. We
call it a parasitical vegetation; but, if the phrase
imply any reproach, it is unkind to bestow it on this
beautiful affection and relationship which exist in
England between one order of plants and another: the
strong tree being always ready to give support to the
trailing shrub, lift it to the sun, and feed it out of
its own heart, if it crave such food; and the shrub,
on its part, repaying its foster-father with an ample
luxuriance of beauty, and adding Corinthian grace to
the tree's lofty strength. No bitter winter nips
these tender little sympathies, no hot sun burns the
life out of them; and therefore they outlast the
longevity of the oak, and, if the woodman permitted,
would bury it in a green grave, when all is over.

Should there be nothing else along the road to look
at, an English hedge might well suffice to occupy the
eyes, and, to a depth beyond what he would suppose,
the heart of an American. We often set out hedges m
our own soil, but might as well set out figs or
pineapples and expect to gather fruit of them.
Something grows, to be sure, which we choose to call a
hedge;but it lacks
the dense, luxuriant variety of vegetation that is
accumulated into the English original, in which a
botanist would find a thousand shrubs and gracious
herbs that the hedgemaker never thought of planting
there. Among them, growing wild, are many of the
kindred blossoms of the very flowers which our pilgrim
fathers brought from England, for the sake of their
simple beauty and homelike associations, and which we
have ever since been cultivating in gardens. There is
not a softer trait to be found in the character of
those stern men than that they should have been
sensible of these flower-roots clinging among the
fibres of their rugged hearts, and have felt the
necessity of bringing them over sea and making them
hereditary in the new land, instead of trusting to
what rarer beauty the wilderness might have in store
for them.

Or, if the roadside has no hedge, the ugliest stone
fence (such as, in America, would keep itself bare and
unsympathizing till the end of time) is sure to be
covered with the small handiwork of Nature; that
careful mother lets nothing go naked there, and if she
cannot provide clothing, gives at least embroidery. No
sooner is the fence built than she adopts and adorns
it as a part of her original plan, treating the hard,
uncomely construction as if it had all along been a
favorite idea of her own. A little sprig of ivy may be
seen creeping up the side of the low wall and clinging
fast with its many feet to the rough surface; a tuft
of grass roots itself between two of the stones, where
a pinch or two of wayside dust has been moistened into
nutritious soil for it; a small bunch of fern grows in
another crevice; a deep, soft, verdant moss spreads
itself along the top, and over all the available
inequalities of the fence; and where nothing else will
grow,lichens stick
tenaciously to the bare stones, and variegate the
monotonous gray with hues of yellow and red. Finally,
a great deal of shrubbery clusters along the base of
the stone wall, and takes away the hardness of its
outline; and in due time, as the upshot of these
apparently aimless or sportive touches, we recognize
that the beneficent Creator of all things, working
through his hand-maiden whom we call Nature, has
designed to mingle a charm of divine gracefulness even
with so earthly an institution as a boundary fence.
The clown who wrought at it little dreamed what
fellow-laborer he had.

The English should send us photographs of portions
of the trunks of trees, the tangled and various
products of a hedge, and a square foot of an old wall.
They can hardly send anything else so characteristic.
Their artists, especially of the later school,
sometimes toil to depict such subjects, but are apt to
stiffen the lithe tendrils in the process. The poets
succeed better, with Tennyson at their head, and often
produce ravishing effects by dint of a tender
minuteness of touch, to which the genius of the soil
and climate artfully impels them: for, as regards
grandeur, there are loftier scenes in many countries
than the best that England can show; but, for the
picturesqueness of the smallest object that lies under
its gentle gloom and sunshine, there is no scenery
like it anywhere.

In the foregoing paragraphs I have strayed away to
a long distance from the road to Stratford-on-Avon;
for I remember no such stone fences as I have been
speaking of in Warwickshire, nor elsewhere in England,
except among the Lakes, or in Yorkshire, and the rough
and hilly countries to the north of it. Hedges there
were along my road, however, and broad,level fields, rustic hamlets, and
cottages of ancient date,--from the roof of one of
which the occupant was tearing away the thatch, and
showing what an accumulation of dust, dirt,
mouldiness, roots of weeds, families of mice,
swallows'-nests, and hordes of insects had been
deposited there since that old straw was new.
Estimating its antiquity from these tokens,
Shakespeare himself, in one of his morning rambles out
of his native town, might have seen the thatch laid
on; at all events, the cottage-walls were old enough
to have known him as a guest. A few modern villas were
also to be seen, and perhaps there were mansions of
old gentility at no great distance, but hidden among
trees; for it is a point of English pride that such
houses seldom allow themselves to be visible from the
high-road. In short, I recollect nothing specially
remarkable along the way, nor in the immediate
approach to Stratford; and yet the picture of that
June morning has a glory in my memory, owing chiefly,
I believe, to the charm of the English summer-weather,
the really good days of which are the most delightful
that mortal man can ever hope to be favored with.
Such a genial warmth! A little too warm, it might be,
yet only to such a degree as to assure an American (a
certainty to which he seldom attains till attempered
to the customary austerity of an English summer-day)
that he was quite warm enough. And after all, there
was an unconquerable freshness in the atmosphere,
which every little movement of a breeze shook over me
like a dash of the ocean-spray. Such days need bring
us no other happiness than their own light and
temperature. No doubt, I could not have enjoyed it so
exquisitely, except that there must be still latent in
us, Western wanderers (even after anabsence of two centuries and
more), an adaptation to the English climate which
makes us sensible of a motherly kindness in its
scantiest sunshine, and overflows us with delight at
its more lavish smiles.

The spire of Shakespeare's church--the Church
of the Holy Trinity--begins to show itself among the
trees at a little distance from Stratford . Next we
see the shabby old dwellings, intermixed with
mean-looking houses of modern date; and the streets
being quite level, you are struck and surprised by
nothing so much as the tameness of the general scene,
as if Shakespeare's genius were vivid enough to have
wrought pictorial splendors in the town where he was
born. Here and there, however, a queer edifice meets
your eye, endowed with the individuality that belongs
only to the domestic architecture of times gone by;
the house seems to have grown out of some odd quality
in its inhabitant, as a seashell is moulded from
within by the character of its inmate; and having been
built in a strange fashion, generations ago, it has
ever since been growing stranger and quainter, as old
humorists are apt to do. Here, too (as so often
impressed me in decayed English towns), there appeared
to be a greater abundance of aged people wearing
small-clothes and leaning on sticks than you could
assemble on our side of the water by sounding a
trumpet and proclaiming a reward for the most
venerable. I tried to account for this phenomenon by
several theories: as, for example, that our new towns
are unwholesome for age and kill it off unseasonably;
or that our old men have a subtile sense of fitness,
and die of their own accord rather than live in an
unseemly contrast with youth and novelty: but the
secret may be, after all, that hair-dyes, false teeth,
modern arts of dress, andcontrivances of a skin-deep
youthfulness, have not crept into these antiquated
English towns, and so people grow old without the
weary necessity of seeming younger than they are.

After wandering through two or three streets, I
found my way to Shakespeare's birthplace, which
is almost a smaller and humbler house than any
description can prepare the visitor to expect; so
inevitably does an august inhabitant make his abode
palatial to our imaginations, receiving his guests,
indeed, in a castle in the air, until we unwisely
insist on meeting him among the sordid lanes and
alleys of lower earth. The portion of the edifice
with which Shakespeare had anything to do is hardly
large enough, in the basement, to contain the
butcher's stall that one of his descendants kept,
and that still remains there, windowless, with the
cleaver-cuts in its hacked counter, which projects
into the street under a little penthouse-roof, as if
waiting for a new occupant.

The upper half of the door was open, and, on my
rapping at it, a young person in black made her
appearance and admitted me; she was not a menial, but
remarkably genteel (an American characteristic) for an
English girl, and was probably the daughter of the old
gentlewoman who takes care of the house. This lower
room has a pavement of gray slabs of stone, which may
have been rudely squared when the house was new, but
are now all cracked, broken, and disarranged in a most
unaccountable way. One does not see how any ordinary
usage, for whatever length of time, should have so
smashed these heavy stones; it is as if an earthquake
had burst up through the floor, which afterwards had
been imperfectly trodden down again. The room is
whitewashed and very clean, butwofully shabby and dingy, coarsely
built, and such as the most poetical imagination would
find it difficult to idealize. In the rear of this
apartment is the kitchen, a still smaller room, of a
similar rude aspect; it has a great, rough fireplace,
with space for a large family under the blackened
opening of the chimney, and an immense passageway for
the smoke, through which Shakespeare may have seen the
blue sky by day and the stars glimmering down at him
by night. It is now a dreary spot where the
long-extinguished embers used to be. A glowing fire,
even if it covered only a quarter part of the hearth,
might still do much towards making the old kitchen
cheerful. But we get a depressing idea of the stifled,
poor, sombre kind of life that could have been lived
in such a dwelling, where this room seems to have been
the gathering-place of the family, with no breadth or
scope, no good retirement, but old and young huddling
together cheek by jowl. What a hardy plant was
Shakespeare's genius, how fatal its development;
since it could not be blighted in such an atmosphere!
It only brought human nature the closer to him, and
put more unctuous earth about his roots.

Thence I was ushered up stairs to the room in which
Shakespeare is supposed to have been born: though, if
you peep too curiously into the matter, you may find
the shadow of an ugly doubt on this, as well as most
other points of his mysterious life. It is the chamber
over the butcher's shop, and is lighted by one
broad window containing a great many small, irregular
panes of glass. The floor is made of planks, very
rudely hewn, and fitting together with little
neatness; the naked beams and rafters, at the sides of
the room and overhead, bear the original marks of the
builder'sbroad-axe, with no evidence of an
attempt to smooth off the job. Again we have to
reconcile ourselves to the smallness of the space
enclosed by these illustrious walls,--a circumstance
more difficult to accept, as regards places that we
have heard, read, thought, and dreamed much about,
than any other disenchanting particular of a mistaken
ideal. A few paces--perhaps seven or eight--take us
from end to end of it. So low it is, that I could
easily touch the ceiling, and might have done so
without a tiptoe-stretch, had it been a good deal
higher; and this humility of the chamber has tempted a
vast multitude of people to write their names overhead
in pencil. Every inch of the side-walls, even into the
obscurest nooks and corners, is covered with a similar
record; all the window-panes, moreover, are scrawled
with diamond signatures, among which is said to be
that of Walter Scott; but so many persons have sought
to immortalize themselves in close vicinity to his
name, that I really could not trace him out. Methinks
it is strange that people do not strive to forget
their forlorn little identities, in such situations,
instead of thrusting them forward into the dazzle of a
great renown, where, if noticed, they cannot but be
deemed impertinent.

This room, and the entire house, so far as I saw
it, are whitewashed and exceedingly clean; nor is
there the aged, musty smell with which old Chester
first made me acquainted, and which goes far to cure
an American of his excessive predilection for antique
residences. An old lady, who took charge of me up
stairs, had the manners and aspect of a gentlewoman,
and talked with somewhat formidable knowledge and
appreciative intelligence about Shakespeare. Arranged
on a table and in chairs were various prints,views of houses and
scenes connected with Shakespeare's memory, together
with editions of his works and local publications
about his home and haunts, from the sale of which this
respectable lady perhaps realizes a handsome profit.
At any rate, I bought a good many of them, conceiving
that it might be the civillest way of requiting her
for her instructive conversation and the trouble she
took in showing me the house. It cost me a pang (not a
curmudgeonly, but a gentlemanly one) to offer a
downright fee to the lady-like girl who had admitted
me; but I swallowed my delicate scruples with some
little difficulty, and she digested hers, so far as I
could observe, with no difficulty at all. In fact,
nobody need fear to hold out half a crown to any
person with whom he has occasion to speak a word in
England.

I should consider it unfair to quit
Shakespeare's house without the frank
acknowledgment that I was conscious of not the
slightest emotion while viewing it, nor any quickening
of the imagination. This has often happened to me in
my visits to memorable places. Whatever pretty and
apposite reflections I may have made upon the subject
had either occurred to me before I ever saw Stratford,
or have been elaborated since. It is pleasant,
nevertheless, to think that I have seen the place; and
I believe that I can form a more sensible and vivid
idea of Shakespeare as a flesh-and-blood individual
now that I have stood on the kitchen-hearth and in the
birth-chamber; but I am not quite certain that this
power of realization is altogether desirable in
reference to a great poet. The Shakespeare whom I met
there took various guises, but had not his laurel on.
He was successively the roguish boy,--the youthful
deer-stealer,--thecomrade of players,--the too
familiar friend of Davenant's mother,--the careful,
thrifty, thriven man of property who came back from
London to lend money on bond, and occupy the best
house in Stratford,--the mellow, red-nosed, autumnal
boon-companion of John a' Combe,--and finally (or
else the Stratford gossips belied him), the victim of
convivial habits, who met his death by tumbling into a
ditch on his way home from a drinking-bout, and left
his second-best bed to his poor wife.

I feel, as sensibly as the reader can, what
horrible impiety it is to remember these things, be
they true or false. In either case, they ought to
vanish out of sight on the distant ocean-line of the
past, leaving a pure, white memory, even as a sail,
though perhaps darkened with many stains, looks snowy
white on the far horizon. But I draw a moral from
these unworthy reminiscences and this embodiment of
the poet, as suggested by some of the grimy
actualities of his life. It is for the high interests
of the world not to insist upon finding out that its
greatest men are, in a certain lower sense, very much
the same kind of men as the rest of us, and often a
little worse; because a common mind cannot properly
digest such a discovery, nor ever know the true
proportion of the great man's good and evil, nor
how small a part of him it was that touched our muddy
or dusty earth. Thence comes moral bewilderment, and
even intellectual loss, in regard to what is best of
him. When Shakespeare invoked a curse on the man who
should stir his bones, he perhaps meant the larger
share of it for him or them who should pry into his
perishing earthliness, the defects or even the merits
of the character that he wore in Stratford, when he
had left mankind so much to museupon that was imperishable and
divine. Heaven keep me from incurring any part of the
anathema in requital for the irreverent sentences
above written!

From Shakespeare's house, the next step, of
course, is to visit his burial-place. The appearance
of the church is most venerable and beautiful,
standing amid a great green shadow of lime-trees,
above which rises the spire, while the Gothic
battlements and buttresses and vast arched windows are
obscurely seen through the boughs. The Avon loiters
past the churchyard, an exceedingly sluggish river,
which might seem to have been considering which way it
should flow ever since Shakespeare left off paddling
in it and gathering the large forget-me-nots that grow
among its flags and water-weeds.

An old man in small-clothes was waiting at the
gate; and inquiring whether I wished to go in, he
preceded me to the church-porch, and rapped. I could
have done it quite as effectually for myself; but it
seems the old people of the neighborhood haunt about
the churchyard, in spite of the frowns and
remonstrances of the sexton, who grudges them the
half-eleemosynary sixpence which they sometimes get
from visitors. I was admitted into the church by a
respectable-looking and intelligent man in black, the
parish-clerk, I suppose, and probably holding a richer
incumbency than his vicar, if all the fees which he
handles remain in his own pocket. He was already
exhibiting the Shakespeare monuments to two or three
visitors, and several other parties came in while I
was there.

The poet and his family are in possession of what
may be considered the very best burial-places that the
church affords. They lie in a row, right across the
breadth of the chancel, the foot of each gravestonebeing close to the
elevated floor on which the altar stands. Nearest to
the side-wall, beneath Shakespeare's bust, is a slab
bearing a Latin inscription addressed to his wife, and
covering her remains; then his own slab, with the old
anathematizing stanza upon it; then that of Thomas
Nash, who married his granddaughter; then that of Dr.
Hall, the husband of his daughter Susannah; and,
lastly, Susannah's own. Shakespeare's is
the commonest-looking slab of all, being just such a
flag-stone as Essex Street in Salem used to be paved
with, when I was a boy. Moreover, unless my eyes or
recollection deceive me, there is a crack across it,
as if it had already undergone some such violence as
the inscription deprecates. Unlike the other monuments
of the family, it bears no name, nor am I acquainted
with the grounds or authority on which it is
absolutely determined to be Shakespeare's;
although, being in a range with those of his wife and
children, it might naturally be attributed to him.
But, then, why does his wife, who died afterwards,
take precedence of him and occupy the place next his
bust? And where are the graves of another daughter
and a son, who have a better right in the family row
than Thomas Nash, his grandson-in-law? Might not one
or both of them have been laid under the nameless
stone? But it is dangerous trifling with
Shakespeare's dust; so I forbear to meddle
further with the grave (though the prohibition makes
it tempting), and shall let whatever bones be in it
rest in peace. Yet I must needs add that the
inscription on the bust seems to imply that
Shakespeare's grave was directly underneath it.

The poet's bust is affixed to the northern
wall of the church, the base of it being about a
man's height,or rather more, above the floor of
the chancel. The features of this piece of sculpture
are entirely unlike any portrait of Shakespeare that I
have ever seen, and compel me to take down the
beautiful, lofty-browed, and noble picture of him
which has hitherto hung in my mental portrait-gallery.
The bust cannot be said to represent a beautiful face
or an eminently noble head; but it clutches firmly
hold of one's sense of reality and insists upon
your accepting it, if not as Shakespeare the poet, yet
as the wealthy burgher of Stratford, the friend of
John a' Combe, who lies yonder in the corner. I
know not what the phrenologists say to the bust. The
forehead is but moderately developed, and retreats
somewhat, the upper part of the skull rising
pyramidally; the eyes are prominent almost beyond the
penthouse of the brow; the upper lip is so long that
it must have been almost a deformity, unless the
sculptor artistically exaggerated its length, in
consideration, that, on the pedestal, it must be
foreshortened by being looked at from below. On the
whole, Shakespeare must have had a singular rather
than a prepossessing face; and it is wonderful how,
with this bust before its eyes, the world has
persisted in maintaining an erroneous notion of his
appearance, allowing painters and sculptors to foist
their idealized nonsense on us all, instead of the
genuine man. For my part, the Shakespeare of my
mind's eye is henceforth to be a personage of a
ruddy English complexion, with a reasonably capacious
brow, intelligent and quickly observant eyes, a nose
curved slightly outward, a long, queer upper lip, with
the mouth a little unclosed beneath it, and cheeks
considerably developed in the lower part and beneath
the chin. But when Shakespeare was himself (for nine
tenths of the time,according to all appearances, he
was but the burgher of Stratford), he doubtless shone
through this dull mask and transfigured it into the
face of an angel.

Fifteen or twenty feet behind the row of
Shakespeare gravestones is the great east-window of
the church, now brilliant with stained glass of recent
manufacture. On one side of this window, under a
sculptured arch of marble, lies a full-length marble
figure of John a' Combe, clad in what I take to
be a robe of municipal dignity, and holding its hands
devoutly clasped. It is a sturdy English figure, with
coarse features, a type of ordinary man whom we smile
to see immortalized in the sculpturesque material of
poets and heroes; but the prayerful attitude
encourages us to believe that the old usurer may not,
after all, have had that grim reception in the other
world which Shakespeare's squib foreboded for
him. By the by, till I grew somewhat familiar with
Warwickshire pronunciation, I never understood that
the point of those ill-natured lines was a pun.
"'Oho!' quoth the Devil, ''t
is my John a' Combe!'"--that is,
"My John has come!"

Close to the poet's bust is a nameless,
oblong, cubic tomb, supposed to be that of a clerical
dignitary of the fourteenth century. The church has
other mural monuments and altar-tombs, one or two of
the latter upholding the recumbent figures of knights
in armor and their dames, very eminent and worshipful
personages in their day, no doubt, but doomed to
appear forever intrusive and impertinent within the
precincts which Shakespeare has made his own. His
renown is tyrannous, and suffers nothing else to be
recognized within the scope of its material presence,
unless illuminated by some side-ray from himself. The
clerkinformed me
that interments no longer take place in any part of
the church. And it is better so; for methinks a person
of delicate individuality, curious about his
burial-place, and desirous of six feet of earth for
himself alone, could never endure to lie buried near
Shakespeare, but would rise up at midnight and grope
his way out of the church-door, rather than sleep in
the shadow of so stupendous a memory.

I should hardly have dared to add another to the
innumerable descriptions of Stratford-on-Avon, if it
had not seemed to me that this would form a fitting
framework to some reminiscences of a very remarkable
woman. Her labor, while she lived, was of a nature and
purpose outwardly irreverent to the name of
Shakespeare, yet, by its actual tendency, entitling
her to the distinction of being that one of all his
worshippers who sought, though she knew it not, to
place the richest and stateliest diadem upon his brow.
We Americans, at least, in the scanty annals of our
literature, cannot afford to forget her high and
conscientious exercise of noble faculties, which,
indeed, if you look at the matter in one way, evolved
only a miserable error, but, more fairly considered,
produced a result worth almost what it cost her. Her
faith in her own ideas was so genuine, that, erroneous
as they were, it transmuted them to gold, or, at all
events, interfused a large proportion of that precious
and indestructible substance among the waste material
from which it can readily be sifted.

The only time I ever saw Miss Bacon was in London,
where she had lodgings in Spring Street, Sussex
Gardens, at the house of a grocer, a portly,
middle-aged, civil, and friendly man, who, as well as
his wife, appeared to feel a personal kindness towards
theirlodger. I was
ushered up two (and I rather believe three) pair of
stairs into a parlor somewhat humbly furnished, and
told that Miss Bacon would come soon. There were a
number of books on the table, and, looking into them,
I found that every one had some reference, more or
less immediate, to her Shakespearian theory,--a volume
of Raleigh's "History of the World," a
volume of Montaigne, a volume of Lord Bacon's
Letters, a volume of Shakespeare's Plays; and on
another table lay a large roll of manuscript, which I
presume to have been a portion of her work. . To be
sure, there was a pocket-Bible among the books, but
everything else referred to the one despotic idea that
had got possession of her mind; and as it had
engrossed her whole soul as well as her intellect, I
have no doubt that she had established subtile
connections between it and the Bible likewise. As is
apt to be the case with solitary students, Miss Bacon
probably read late and rose late; for I took up
Montaigne (it was Hazlitt's translation) and had
been reading his journey to Italy a good while before
she appeared.

I had expected (the more shame for me, having no
other ground of such expectation than that she was a
literary woman) to see a very homely, uncouth, elderly
personage, and was quite agreeably disappointed by her
aspect. She was rather uncommonly tall, and had a
striking and expressive face, dark hair, dark eyes,
which shone with an inward light as soon as she began
to speak, and by and by a color came into her cheeks
and made her look almost young. Not that she really
was so; she must have been beyond middle age: and
there was no unkindness in coming to that conclusion,
because, making allowance for years and ill-health, I
could suppose her to have been handsomeand exceedingly attractive once.
Though wholly estranged from society, there was little
or no restraint or embarrassment in her manner: lonely
people are generally glad to give utterance to their
pent-up ideas, and often bubble over with them as
freely as children with their new-found syllables. I
cannot tell how it came about, but we immediately
found ourselves taking a friendly and familiar tone
together, and began to talk as if we had known one
another a very long while. A little preliminary
correspondence had indeed smoothed the way, and we had
a definite topic in the contemplated publication of
her book.

She was very communicative about her theory, and
would have been much more so had I desired it; but,
being conscious within myself of a sturdy unbelief, I
deemed it fair and honest rather to repress than draw
her out upon the subject. Unquestionably, she was a
monomaniac; these overmastering ideas about the
authorship of Shakespeare's Plays, and the deep
political philosophy concealed beneath the surface of
them, had completely thrown her off her balance; but
at the same time they had wonderfully developed her
intellect, and made her what she could not otherwise
have become. It was a very singular phenomenon: a
system of philosophy growing up in this woman's mind
without her volition,--contrary, in fact, to the
determined resistance of her volition,--and
substituting itself in the place of everything that
originally grew there. To have based such a system on
fancy, and unconsciously elaborated it for herself,
was almost as wonderful as really to have found it in
the plays. But, in a certain sense, she did actually
find it there. Shakespeare has surface beneath
surface, to an immeasurable depth, adapted to the
plummet-line ofevery reader; his works present
many phases of truth, each with scope large enough to
fill a contemplative mind. Whatever you seek in him
you will surely discover, provided you seek truth.
There is no exhausting the various interpretation of
his symbols; and a thousand years hence a world of new
readers will possess a whole library of new books, as
we ourselves do, in these volumes old already. I had
half a mind to suggest to Miss Bacon this explanation
of her theory, but forbore, because (as I could
readily perceive) she had as princely a spirit as
Queen Elizabeth herself, and would at once have
motioned me from the room.

I had heard, long ago, that she believed that the
material evidences of her dogma as to the authorship,
together with the key of the new philosophy, would be
found buried in Shakespeare's grave. Recently, as
I understood her, this notion had been somewhat
modified, and was now accurately defined and fully
developed in her mind, with a result of perfect
certainty. In Lord Bacon's Letters, on which she
laid her finger as she spoke, she had discovered the
key and clew to the whole mystery. There were definite
and minute instructions how to find a will and other
documents relating to the conclave of Elizabethan
philosophers, which were concealed (when and by whom
she did not inform me) in a hollow space in the under
surface of Shakespeare's gravestone. Thus the
terrible prohibition to remove the stone was accounted
for. The directions, she intimated, went completely
and precisely to the point, obviating all difficulties
in the way of coming at the treasure, and even, if I
remember right, were so contrived as to ward off any
troublesome consequences likely to ensue from the
interference of the parish-officers. All that Miss
Bacon now remained inEngland for--indeed, the object
for which she had come hither, and which had kept her
here for three years past--was to obtain possession of
these material and unquestionable proofs of the
authenticity of her theory.

She communicated all this strange matter in a low,
quiet tone; while, on my part, I listened as quietly,
and without any expression of dissent. Controversy
against a faith so settled would have shut her up at
once, and that, too, without in the least weakening
her belief in the existence of those treasures of the
tomb; and had it been possible to convince her of
their intangible nature, I apprehend that there would
have been nothing left for the poor enthusiast save to
collapse and die. She frankly confessed that she could
no longer bear the society of those who did not at
least lend a certain sympathy to her views, if not
fully share in them; and meeting little sympathy or
none, she had now entirely secluded herself from the
world. In all these years, she had seen Mrs. Farrar a
few times, but had long ago given her up; Carlyle once
or twice, but not of late, although he had received
her kindly; Mr. Buchanan, while Minister in England,
had once called on her; and General Campbell, our
Consul in London, had met her two or three times on
business. With these exceptions, which she marked so
scrupulously that it was perceptible what epochs they
were in the monotonous passage of her days, she had
lived in the profoundest solitude. She never walked
out; she suffered much from ill-health; and yet, she
assured me, she was perfectly happy.

I could well conceive it; for Miss Bacon imagined
herself to have received (what is certainly the
greatest boon ever assigned to mortals) a high mission
in theworld, with
adequate powers for its accomplishment; and lest even
these should prove insufficient, she had faith that
special interpositions of Providence were forwarding
her human efforts. This idea was continually coming to
the surface, during our interview. She believed, for
example, that she had been providentially led to her
lodging-house, and put in relations with the
good-natured grocer and his family; and, to say the
truth, considering what a savage and stealthy tribe
the London lodging-house keepers usually are, the
honest kindness of this man and his household appeared
to have been little less than miraculous. Evidently,
too, she thought that Providence had brought me
forward--a man somewhat connected with literature--at
the critical juncture when she needed a negotiator
with the booksellers; and, on my part, though little
accustomed to regard myself as a divine minister, and
though I might even have preferred that Providence
should select some other instrument, I had no scruple
in undertaking to do what I could for her. Her book,
as I could see by turning it over, was a very
remarkable one, and worthy of being offered to the
public, which, if wise enough to appreciate it, would
be thankful for what was good in it and merciful to
its faults. It was founded on a prodigious error, but
was built up from that foundation with a good many
prodigious truths. And, at all events, whether I could
aid her literary views or no, it would have been both
rash and impertinent in me to attempt drawing poor
Miss Bacon out of her delusions, which were the
condition on which she lived in comfort and joy, and
in the exercise of great intellectual power. So I
left her to dream as she pleased about the treasures
of Shakespeare's tombstone, and to
formwhatever
designs might seem good to herself for obtaining
possession of them. I was sensible of a lady-like
feeling of propriety in Miss Bacon, and a New England
orderliness in her character, and, in spite of her
bewilderment, a sturdy common-sense, which I trusted
would begin to operate at the right time, and keep her
from any actual extravagance. And as regarded this
matter of the tombstone, so it proved.

The interview lasted above an hour, during which
she flowed out freely, as to the sole auditor, capable
of any degree of intelligent sympathy, whom she had
met with in a very long while. Her conversation was
remarkably suggestive, alluring forth one's own
ideas and fantasies from the shy places where they
usually haunt. She was indeed an admirable talker,
considering how long she had held her tongue for lack
of a listener,--pleasant, sunny, and shadowy, often
piquant, and giving glimpses of all a woman's various
and readily changeable moods and humors; and beneath
them all there ran a deep and powerful undercurrent of
earnestness, which did not fail to produce in the
listener's mind something like a temporary faith
in what she herself believed so fervently. But the
streets of London are not favorable to enthusiasms of
this kind, nor, in fact, are they likely to flourish
anywhere in the English atmosphere; so that, long
before reaching Paternoster Row, I felt that it would
be a difficult and doubtful matter to advocate the
publication of Miss Bacon's book. Nevertheless, it did
finally get published.

Months before that happened, however, Miss Bacon
had taken up her residence at Stratford-on-Avon, drawn
thither by the magnetism of those rich secrets which
she supposed to have been hidden by Raleigh,or Bacon, or I know
not whom, in Shakespeare's grave, and protected
there by a curse, as pirates used to bury their gold
in the guardianship of a fiend. She took a humble
lodging and began to haunt the church like a ghost.
But she did not condescend to any stratagem or
underhand attempt to violate the grave, which, had she
been capable of admitting such an idea, might possibly
have been accomplished by the aid of a
resurrection-man. As her first step, she made
acquaintance with the clerk, and began to sound him as
to the feasibility of her enterprise and his own
willingness to engage in it. The clerk apparently
listened with not unfavorable ears; but as his
situation (which the fees of pilgrims, more numerous
than at any Catholic shrine, render lucrative) would
have been forfeited by any malfeasance in office, he
stipulated for liberty to consult the vicar. Miss
Bacon requested to tell her own story to the reverend
gentleman, and seems to have been received by him with
the utmost kindness, and even to have succeeded in
making a certain impression on his mind as to the
desirability of the search. As their interview had
been under the seal of secrecy, he asked permission to
consult a friend, who, as Miss Bacon either found out
or surmised, was a practitioner of the law. What the
legal friend advised she did not learn; but the
negotiation continued, and certainly was never broken
off by an absolute refusal on the vicar's part.
He, perhaps, was kindly temporizing with our poor
countrywoman, whom an Englishman of ordinary mould
would have sent to a lunatic asylum at once. I cannot
help fancying, however, that her familiarity with the
events of Shakespeare's life, and of his death and
burial (of which she would speak as if she had been
present at theedge
of the grave), and all the history, literature, and
personalities of the Elizabethan age, together with
the prevailing power of her own belief, and the
eloquence with which she knew how to enforce it, had
really gone some little way toward making a convert of
the good clergyman. If so, I honor him above all the
hierarchy of England.

The affair certainly looked very hopeful. However
erroneously, Miss Bacon had understood from the vicar
that no obstacles would be interposed to the
investigation, and that he himself would sanction it
with his presence. It was to take place after
nightfall; and all preliminary arrangements being
made, the vicar and clerk professed to wait only her
word in order to set about lifting the awful stone
from the sepulchre. So, at least, Miss Bacon believed;
and as her bewilderment was entirely in her own
thoughts, and never disturbed her perception or
accurate remembrance of external things, I see no
reason to doubt it, except it be the tinge of
absurdity in the fact. But, in this apparently
prosperous state of things, her own convictions began
to falter. A doubt stole into her mind whether she
might not have mistaken the depository and mode of
concealment of those historic treasures; and, after
once admitting the doubt, she was afraid to hazard the
shock of uplifting the stone and finding nothing. She
examined the surface of the gravestone, and
endeavored, without stirring it, to estimate whether
it were of such thickness as to be capable of
containing the archives of the Elizabethan club. She
went over anew the proofs, the clews, the enigmas, the
pregnant sentences, which she had discovered in
Bacon's Letters and elsewhere, and now was
frightened to perceive that they did not point so
definitely toShakespeare's tomb as she had
heretofore supposed. There was an unmistakably
distinct reference to a tomb, but it might be
Bacon's, or Raleigh's, or Spenser's; and
instead of the "Old Player," as she profanely called
him, it might be either of those three illustrious
dead, poet, warrior, or statesman, whose ashes, in
Westminster Abbey, or the Tower burial-ground, or
wherever they sleep, it was her mission to disturb. It
is very possible, moreover, that her acute mind may
always have had a lurking and deeply latent distrust
of its own fantasies, and that this now became strong
enough to restrain her from a decisive step.

But she continued to hover around the church, and
seems to have had full freedom of entrance in the
daytime, and special license, on one occasion at
least, at a late hour of the night. She went thither
with a dark-lantern, which could but twinkle like a
glow-worm through the volume of obscurity that filled
the great dusky edifice. Groping her way up the aisle
and towards the chancel, she sat down on the elevated
part of the pavement above Shakespeare's grave.
If the divine poet really wrote the inscription there,
and cared as much about the quiet of his bones as its
deprecatory earnestness would imply, it was time for
those crumbling relics to bestir themselves under her
sacrilegious feet. But they were safe. She made no
attempt to disturb them; though, I believe, she looked
narrowly into the crevices between Shakespeare's
and the two adjacent stones, and in some way satisfied
herself that her single strength would suffice to lift
the former, in case of need. She threw the feeble ray
of her lantern up towards the bust, but could not make
it visible beneath the darkness of the vaultedroof. Had she been
subject to superstitious terrors, it is impossible to
conceive of a situation that could better entitle her
to feel them, for, if Shakespeare's ghost would
rise at any provocation, it must have shown itself
then; but it is my sincere belief, that, if his figure
had appeared within the scope of her dark-lantern, in
his slashed doublet and gown, and with his eyes bent
on her beneath the high, bald forehead, just as we see
him in the bust, she would have met him fearlessly,
and controverted his claims to the authorship of the
plays, to his very face. She had taught herself to
contemn "Lord Leicester's groom" (it
was one of her disdainful epithets for the
world's incomparable poet) so thoroughly, that
even his disembodied spirit would hardly have found
civil treatment at Miss Bacon's hands.

Her vigil, though it appears to have had no
definite object, continued far into the night. Several
times she heard a low movement in the aisles: a
stealthy, dubious footfall prowling about in the
darkness, now here, now there, among the pillars and
ancient tombs, as if some restless inhabitant of the
latter had crept forth to peep at the intruder. By and
by the clerk made his appearance, and confessed that
he had been watching her ever since she entered the
church.

About this time it was that a strange sort of
weariness seems to have fallen upon her: her toil was
all but done, her great purpose, as she believed, on
the very point of accomplishment, when she began to
regret that so stupendous a mission had been imposed
on the fragility of a woman. Her faith in the new
philosophy was as mighty as ever, and so was her
confidence in her own adequate development of it, now
about to be given to the world; yet she wished, orfancied so, that it
might never have been her duty to achieve this
unparalleled task, and to stagger feebly forward under
her immense burden of responsibility and renown. So
far as her personal concern in the matter went, she
would gladly have forfeited the reward of her patient
study and labor for so many years, her exile from her
country and estrangement from her family and friends,
her sacrifice of health and all other interests to
this one pursuit, if she could only find herself free
to dwell in Stratford and be forgotten. She liked the
old slumberous town, and awarded the only praise that
ever I knew her to bestow on Shakespeare, the
individual man, by acknowledging that his taste in a
residence was good, and that he knew how to choose a
suitable retirement for a person of shy, but genial
temperament. And at this point, I cease to possess the
means of tracing her vicissitudes of feeling any
further. In consequence of some advice which I fancied
it my duty to tender, as being the only confidant whom
she now had in the world, I fell under Miss Bacon's
most severe and passionate displeasure, and was cast
off by her in the twinkling of an eye. It was a
misfortune to which her friends were always
particularly liable; but I think that none of them
ever loved, or even respected, her most ingenuous and
noble, but likewise most sensitive and tumultuous
character, the less for it.

At that time her book was passing through the
press. Without prejudice to her literary ability, it
must be allowed that Miss Bacon was wholly unfit to
prepare her own work for publication, because, among
many other reasons, she was too thoroughly in earnest
to know what to leave out. Every leaf and line was
sacred, for all had been written under so deep aconviction of truth as
to assume, in her eyes, the aspect of inspiration. A
practised book-maker, with entire control of her
materials, would have shaped out a duodecimo volume
full of eloquent and ingenious
dissertation,--criticisms which quite take the color
and pungency out of other people's critical
remarks on Shakespeare, --philosophic truths which she
imagined herself to have found at the roots of his
conceptions, and which certainly come from no
inconsiderable depth somewhere. There was a great
amount of rubbish, which any competent editor would
have shovelled out of the way. But Miss Bacon thrust
the whole bulk of inspiration and nonsense into the
press in a lump, and there tumbled out a ponderous
octave volume, which fell with a dead thump at the
feet of the public, and has never been picked up. A
few persons turned over one or two of the leaves, as
it lay there, and essayed to kick the volume deeper
into the mud; for they were the hack critics of the
minor periodical press in London, than whom, I
suppose, though excellent fellows in their way, there
are no gentlemen in the world less sensible of any
sanctity in a book, or less likely to recognize an
author's heart in it, or more utterly careless about
bruising, if they do recognize it. It is their trade.
They could not do otherwise. I never thought of
blaming them. It was not for such an Englishman as one
of these to get beyond the idea that an assault was
meditated on England's greatest poet. From the
scholars and critics of her own country, indeed, Miss
Bacon might have looked for a worthier appreciation,
because many of the best of them have higher
cultivation, and finer and deeper literary
sensibilities than all but the very profoundest and
brightest of Englishmen. But they are not a
courageous body of men; they darenot think a truth that has an odor
of absurdity, lest they should feel themselves bound
to speak it out. If any American ever wrote a word in
her behalf, Miss Bacon never knew it, nor did I. Our
journalists at once republished some of the most
brutal vituperations of the English press, thus
pelting their poor countrywoman with stolen mud,
without even waiting to know whether the ignominy was
deserved. And they never have known it, to this day,
nor ever will.

The next intelligence that I had of Miss Bacon was
by a letter from the mayor of Stratford-on-Avon. He
was a medical man, and wrote both in his official and
professional character, telling me that an American
lady, who had recently published what the mayor called
a "Shakespeare book," was afflicted with
insanity. In a lucid interval she had referred to me,
as a person who had some knowledge of her family and
affairs. What she may have suffered before her
intellect gave way, we had better not try to imagine.
No author had ever hoped so confidently as she; none
ever failed more utterly. A superstitious fancy might
suggest that the anathema on Shakespeare's
tombstone had fallen heavily on her head, in requital
of even the unaccomplished purpose of disturbing the
dust beneath, and that the "Old Player" had kept so
quietly in his grave, on the night of her vigil,
because he foresaw how soon and terribly he would be
avenged. But if that benign spirit takes any care or
cognizance of such things now, he has surely requited
the injustice that she sought to do him--the high
justice that she really did--by a tenderness of love
and pity of which only he could he capable. What
matters it though she called him by some other name?
He had wrought a greater miracle on her than on all
the world besides.This bewildered enthusiast had
recognized a depth in the man whom she decried, which
scholars, critics, and learned societies, devoted to
the elucidation of his unrivalled scenes, had never
imagined to exist there. She had paid him the
loftiest honor that all these ages of renown have been
able to accumulate upon his memory. And when, not many
months after the outward failure of her lifelong
object, she passed into the better world, I know not
why we should hesitate to believe that the immortal
poet may have met her on the threshold and led her in,
reassuring her with friendly and comfortable words,
and thanking her (yet with a smile of gentle humor in
his eyes at the thought of certain mistaken
speculations) for having interpreted him to mankind so
well.

I believe that it has been the fate of this
remarkable book never to have had more than a single
reader. I myself am acquainted with it only in
insulated chapters and scattered pages and paragraphs.
But, since my return to America, a young man of genius
and enthusiasm has assured me that he has positively
read the book from beginning to end, and is completely
a convert to its doctrines. It belongs to him,
therefore, and not to me,--whom, in almost the last
letter that I received from her, she declared unworthy
to meddle with her work,--it belongs surely to this
one individual, who has done her so much justice as to
know what she wrote, to place Miss Bacon in her due
position before the public and posterity.

This has been too sad a story. To lighten the
recollection of it, I will think of my stroll homeward
past Charlecote Park, where I beheld the most stately
elms, singly, in clumps, and in groves, scattered all
about in the sunniest, shadiest, sleepiest fashion; so
that Icould not but
believe in lengthened, loitering, drowsy enjoyment
which these trees must have in their existence.
Diffused over slow-paced centuries, it need not be
keen nor bubble into thrills and ecstasies, like the
momentary delights of short-lived human beings. They
were civilized trees, known to man, and befriended by
him for ages past. There is an indescribable
difference--as I believe I have heretofore endeavored
to express--between the tamed, but by no means effete
(on the contrary, the richer and more luxuriant),
nature of England, and the rude, shaggy, barbarous
nature which offers us its racier companionship in
America. No less a change has been wrought among the
wildest creatures that inhabit what the English call
their forests. By and by, among those refined and
venerable trees, I saw a large herd of deer, mostly
reclining, but some standing in picturesque groups,
while the stags threw their large antlers aloft, as if
they had been taught to make themselves tributary to
the scenic effect. Some were running fleetly about,
vanishing from light into shadow and glancing forth
again, with here and there a little fawn careering at
its mother's heels. These deer are almost in the same
relation to the wild, natural state of their kind that
the trees of an English park hold to the rugged growth
of an American forest. They have held a certain
intercourse with man for immemorial years; and, most
probably, the stag that Shakespeare killed was one of
the progenitors of this very herd, and may himself
have been a partly civilized and humanized deer,
though in a less degree than these remote posterity.
They are a little wilder than sheep, but they do not
snuff the air at the approach of human beings, nor
evince much alarm at their prettyclose proximity; although if you
continue to advance, they toss their heads and take to
their heels in a kind of mimic terror, or something
akin to feminine skittishness, with a dim remembrance
or tradition, as it were, of their having come of a
wild stock. They have so long been fed and protected
by man, that they must have lost many of their native
instincts, and, I suppose, could not live comfortably
through even an English winter without human help. One
is sensible of a gentle scorn at them for such
dependency, but feels none the less kindly disposed
towards the half-domesticated race; and it may have
been his observation of these tamer characteristics in
the Charlecote herd that suggested to Shakespeare the
tender and pitiful description of a wounded stag, in
"As You Like It."

At a distance of some hundreds of yards from
Charlecote Hall, and almost hidden by the trees
between it and the roadside, is an old brick archway
and porter's lodge. In connection with this
entrance there appears to have been a wall and an
ancient moat, the latter of which is still visible, a
shallow, grassy scoop along the base of an embankment
of the lawn. About fifty yards within the gateway
stands the house, forming three sides of a square,
with three gables in a row on the front, and on each
of the two wings; and there are several towers and
turrets at the angles, together with projecting
windows, antique balconies, and other quaint ornaments
suitable to the half-Gothic taste in which the edifice
was built. Over the gateway is the Lucy coat of arms,
emblazoned in its proper colors. The mansion dates
from the early days of Elizabeth, and probably looked
very much the same as now when Shakespeare was
broughtbefore Sir
Thomas Lucy for outrages among his deer. The
impression is not that of gray antiquity, but of
stable and time-honored gentility, still as vital as
ever.

It is a most delightful place. All about the house
and domain there is a perfection of comfort and
domestic taste, an amplitude of convenience, which
could have been brought about only by the slow
ingenuity and labor of many successive generations,
intent upon adding all possible improvement to the
home where years gone by and years to come give a sort
of permanence to the intangible present. An American
is sometimes tempted to fancy that only by this long
process can real homes be produced. One man's
lifetime is not enough for the accomplishment of such
a work of art and nature, almost the greatest merely
temporary one that is confided to him; too little, at
any rate,--yet perhaps too long when he is discouraged
by the idea that he must make his house warm and
delightful for a miscellaneous race of successors, of
whom the one thing certain is, that his own
grand-children will not be among them. Such repinings
as are here suggested, however, come only from the
fact, that, bred in English habits of thought, as most
of us are, we have not yet modified our instincts to
the necessities of our new forms of life. A lodging in
a wigwam or under a tent has really as many
advantages, when we come to know them, as a home
beneath the roof-tree of Charlecote Hall. But, alas!
our philosophers have not yet taught us what is best,
nor have our poets sung us what is beautifullest, in
the kind of life that we must lead; and therefore we
still read the old English wisdom, and harp upon the
ancient strings. And thence it happens, that, when we
look at a time-honored hall, it seems more possible
for menwho inherit
such a home, than for ourselves, to lead noble and
graceful lives, quietly doing good and lovely things
as their daily work, and achieving deeds of simple
greatness when circumstances require them. I sometimes
apprehend that our institutions may perish before we
shall have discovered the most precious of the
possibilities which they involve.

LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER.

AFTER my first visit to Leamington Spa, I went by
an indirect route to Lichfield, and put up at the
Black Swan. Had I known where to find it, I would much
rather have established myself at the inn formerly
kept by the worthy Mr. Boniface, so famous for his ale
in Farquhar's time. The Black Swan is an
old-fashioned hotel, its street-front being penetrated
by an arched passage, in either side of which is an
entrance-door to the different parts of the house, and
through which, and over the large stones of its
pavement, all vehicles and horsemen rumble and clatter
into an enclosed court-yard, with a thunderous uproar
among the contiguous rooms and chambers. I appeared to
be the only guest of the spacious establishment, but
may have had a few fellow-lodgers hidden in their
separate parlors, and utterly eschewing that community
of interests which is the characteristic feature of
life in an American hotel. At any rate, I had the
great, dull, dingy, and dreary coffee-room, with its
heavy old mahogany chairs and tables, all to myself,
and not a soul to exchange a word with, except the
waiter, who, like most of his class in England, had
evidently left his conversational abilities
uncultivated. No former practice of solitary living,
nor habits of reticence, nor well-tested
self-dependence for occupation of mind and amusement,
can quite avail, as I now proved, to dissipate the
ponderous gloom of an English coffee-room under such
circumstances as these, with no book athand save the county-directory,
nor any newspaper but a torn local journal of five
days ago. So I buried myself, betimes, in a huge heap
of ancient feathers (there is no other kind of bed in
these old inns), let my head sink into an
unsubstantial pillow, and slept a stifled sleep,
infested with such a fragmentary confusion of dreams
that I took them to be a medley, compounded of the
night-troubles of all my predecessors in that same
unrestful couch. And when I awoke, the musty odor of a
by-gone century was in my nostrils,--a faint, elusive
smell, of which I never had any conception before
crossing the Atlantic.

In the morning, after a mutton-chop and a cup of
chiccory in the dusky coffee-room, I went forth and
bewildered myself a little while among the crooked
streets, in quest of one or two objects that had
chiefly attracted me to the spot. The city is of very
ancient date, and its name in the old Saxon tongue has
a dismal import that would apply well, in these days
and forever henceforward, to many an unhappy locality
in our native land. Lichfield signifies "The
Field of the Dead Bodies,"--an epithet, however,
which the town did not assume in remembrance of a
battle, but which probably sprung up by a natural
process, like a sprig of rue or other funereal weed,
out of the graves of two princely brothers, sons of a
pagan king of Mercia, who were converted by St. Chad,
and afterwards martyred for their Christian faith.
Nevertheless, I was but little interested in the
legends of the remote antiquity of Lichfield, being
drawn thither partly to see its beautiful cathedral,
and still more, I believe, because it was the
birthplace of Dr. Johnson, with whose sturdy English
character I became acquainted, at a very early period
of my life, through the good officesof Mr. Boswell. In truth, he seems
as familiar to my recollection, and almost as vivid in
his personal aspect to my mind's eye, as the kindly
figure of my own grandfather. It is only a solitary
child,--left much to such wild modes of culture as he
chooses for himself while yet ignorant what culture
means, standing on tiptoe to pull down books from no
very lofty shelf, and then shutting himself up, as it
were, between the leaves, going astray through the
volume at his own pleasure, and comprehending it
rather by his sensibilities and affections than his
intellect,--that child is the only student that ever
gets the sort of intimacy which I am now thinking of,
with a literary personage. I do not remember, indeed,
ever caring much about any of the stalwart
Doctor's grandiloquent productions, except his
two stern and masculine poems, "London," and
"The Vanity of Human Wishes;" it was as a
man, a talker, and a humorist, that I knew, and loved
him, appreciating many of his qualities perhaps more
thoroughly than I do now, though never seeking to put
my instinctive perception of his character into
language.

Beyond all question, I might have had a wiser
friend than he. The atmosphere in which alone he
breathed was dense; his awful dread of death showed
how much muddy imperfection was to be cleansed out of
him, before he could be capable of spiritual
existence; he meddled only with the surface of life,
and never cared to penetrate further than to
ploughshare depth; his very sense and sagacity were
but a one-eyed clear-sightedness. I laughed at him,
sometimes, standing beside his knee. And yet,
considering that my native propensities were towards
Fairy Land, and also how much yeast is generally mixed
up with the mentalsustenance of a New-Englander, it
may not have been altogether amiss, in those childish
and boyish days, to keep pace with this heavy-footed
traveller, and feed on the gross diet that he carried
in his knapsack. It is wholesome food even now. And,
then, how English! Many of the latent sympathies that
enabled me to enjoy the Old Country so well, and that
so readily amalgamated themselves with the American
ideas that seemed most adverse to them, may have been
derived from, or fostered and kept alive by, the great
English moralist. Never was a descriptive epithet more
nicely appropriate than that! Dr. Johnson's
morality was as English an article as a beefsteak.

The city of Lichfield (only the cathedral-towns are
called cities in England) stands on an ascending site.
It has not so many old gabled houses as Coventry, for
example, but still enough to gratify an American
appetite for the antiquities of domestic architecture.
The people, too, have an old-fashioned way with them,
and stare at the passing visitor, as if the railway
had not yet quite accustomed them to the novelty of
strange faces moving along their ancient sidewalks.
The old women whom I met, in several instances, dropt
me a courtesy; and as they were of decent and
comfortable exterior, and kept quietly on their way
without pause or further greeting, it certainly was
not allowable to interpret their little act of respect
as a modest method of asking for sixpence; so that I
had the pleasure of considering it a remnant of the
reverential and hospitable manners of elder times,
when the rare presence of a stranger might be deemed
worth a general acknowledgment. Positively, coming
from such humble sources, I took it all the more as a
welcome on behalf of the inhabitants, and would not
haveexchanged it
for an invitation from the mayor and magistrates to a
public dinner. Yet I wish, merely for the
experiment's sake, that I could have emboldened
myself to hold out the aforesaid sixpence to at least
one of the old ladies.

In my wanderings about town, I came to an
artificial piece of water, called the Minster Pool. It
fills the immense cavity in a ledge of rock, whence
the building-materials of the cathedral were quarried
out a great many centuries ago. I should never have
guessed the little lake to be of man's creation,
so very pretty and quietly picturesque an object has
it grown to be, with its green banks, and the old
trees hanging over its glassy surface, in which you
may see reflected some of the battlements of the
majestic structure that once lay here in unshaped
stone. Some little children stood on the edge of the
Pool, angling with pin-hooks; and the scene reminded
me (though really, to be quite fair with the reader,
the gist of the analogy has now escaped me) of that
mysterious lake in the Arabian Nights, which had once
been a palace and a city, and where a fisherman used
to pull out the former inhabitants in the guise of
enchanted fishes. There is no need of fanciful
associations to make the spot interesting. It was in
the porch of one of the houses, in the street that
runs beside the Minster Pool, that Lord Brooke. was
slain, in the time of the Parliamentary war, by a shot
from the battlements of the cathedral, which was then
held by the Royalists as a fortress. The incident is
commemorated by an inscription on a stone, inlaid into
the wall of the house.

I know not what rank the Cathedral of Lichfield
holds among its sister edifices in England, as a piece
of magnificent architecture. Except that of Chester(the grim and simple
nave of which stands yet unrivalled in my memory), and
one or two small ones in North Wales, hardly worthy of
the name of cathedrals, it was the first that I had
seen. To my uninstructed vision, it seemed the object
best worth gazing at in the whole world; and now,
after beholding a great many more, I remember it with
less prodigal admiration only because others are as
magnificent as itself. The traces remaining in my
memory represent it as airy rather than massive. A
multitude of beautiful shapes appeared to be
comprehended within its single outline; it was a kind
of kaleidoscopic mystery so rich a variety of aspects
did it assume from each altered point of view, through
the presentation of a different face, and the
rearrangement of its peaks and pinnacles and the three
battlemented towers, with the spires that shot
heavenward from all three, but one loftier than its
fellows. Thus it impressed you, at every change, as a
newly created structure of the passing moment, in
which yet you lovingly recognized the half-vanished
structure of the instant before, and felt, moreover, a
joyful faith in the indestructible existence of all
this cloudlike vicissitude. A Gothic cathedral is
surely the most wonderful work which mortal man has
yet achieved, so vast, so intricate, and so profoundly
simple, with such strange, delightful recesses in its
grand figure, so difficult to comprehend within one
idea, and yet all so consonant that it ultimately
draws the beholder and his universe into its harmony.
It is the only thing in the world that is vast enough
and rich enough.

Not that I felt, or was worthy to feel, an
unmingled enjoyment in gazing at this wonder. I could
not elevate myself to its spiritual height, any more
than Icould have
climbed from the ground to the summit of one of its
pinnacles. Ascending but a little way, I continually
fell back and lay in a kind of despair, conscious that
a flood of uncomprehended beauty was pouring down upon
me, of which I could appropriate only the minutest
portion. After a hundred years, incalculably as my
higher sympathies might be invigorated by so divine an
employment, I should still be a gazer from below and
at an awful distance, as yet remotely excluded from
the interior mystery. But it was something gained,
even to have that painful sense of my own limitations,
and that half-smothered yearning to soar beyond them.
The cathedral showed me how earthly I was, but yet
whispered deeply of immortality. After all, this was
probably the best lesson that it could bestow, and,
taking it as thoroughly as possible home to my heart,
I was fain to be content. If the truth must be told,
my ill-trained enthusiasm soon flagged, and I began to
lose the vision of a spiritual or ideal edifice behind
the timeworn and weather-stained front of the actual
structure. Whenever that is the case, it is most
reverential to look another way; but the mood disposes
one to minute investigation, and I took advantage of
it to examine the intricate and multitudinous
adornment that was lavished on the exterior wall of
this great church. Everywhere, there were empty
niches where statues had been thrown down, and here
and there a statue still lingered in its niche; and
over the chief entrance, and extending across the
whole breadth of the building, was a row of angels,
sainted personages, martyrs, and kings, sculptured in
reddish stone. Being much corroded by the moist
English atmosphere, during four or five hundred
winters that they had stood there,these benign and majestic figures
perversely put me in mind of the appearance of a sugar
image, after a child has been holding it in his mouth.
The venerable infant Time has evidently found them
sweet morsels.

Inside of the Minster there is a long and lofty
nave, transepts of the same height, and side-aisles
and chapels, dim nooks of holiness, where in Catholic
times the lamps were continually burning before the
richly decorated shrines of saints. In the audacity of
my ignorance, as I humbly acknowledge it to have been,
I criticised this great interior as too much broken
into compartments, and shorn of half its rightful
impressiveness by the interposition of a screen
betwixt the nave and chancel. It did not spread itself
in breadth, but ascended to the roof in lofty
narrowness. One large body of worshippers might have
knelt down in the nave, others in each of the
transepts, and smaller ones in the side-aisles,
besides an indefinite number of esoteric enthusiasts
in the mysterious sanctities beyond the screen. Thus
it seemed to typify the exclusiveness of sects, rather
than the world-wide hospitality of genuine religion. I
had imagined a cathedral with a scope more vast. These
Gothic aisles, with their groined arches overhead,
supported by clustered pillars in long vistas up and
down, were venerable and magnificent, but included too
much of the twilight of that monkish gloom out of
which they grew. It is no matter whether I ever came
to a more satisfactory appreciation of this kind of
architecture; the only value of my strictures being to
show the folly of looking at noble objects in the
wrong mood, and the absurdity of a new visitant
pretending to hold any opinion whatever on such
subjects, instead of surrendering himself to the old
builder's influence with childlike simplicity.

A great deal of white marble decorates the old
stonework of the aisles, in the shape of altars,
obelisks, sarcophagi, and busts. Most of these
memorials are commemorative of people locally
distinguished, especially the deans and canons of the
Cathedral, with their relatives and families; and I
found but two monuments of personages whom I had ever
heard of,--one being Gilbert Walmesley and the other
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, a literary acquaintance of
my boyhood. It was really pleasant to meet her there;
for after a friend has lain in the grave far into the
second century, she would be unreasonable to require
any melancholy emotions in a chance interview at her
tombstone. It adds a rich charm to sacred edifices,
this time-honored custom of burial in churches, after
a few years, at least, when the mortal remains have
turned to dust beneath the pavement, and the quaint
devices and inscriptions still speak to you above. The
statues, that stood or reclined in several recesses of
the Cathedral, had a kind of life, and I regarded them
with an odd sort of deference, as if they were
privileged denizens of the precinct. It was singular,
too, how the memorial of the latest buried person, the
man whose features were familiar in the streets of
Lichfield only yesterday, seemed precisely as much at
home here as his mediæval predecessors.
Henceforward he belonged to the Cathedral like one of
its original pillars. Methought this impression in my
fancy might be the shadow of a spiritual fact. The
dying melt into the great multitude of the Departed as
quietly as a drop of water into the ocean, and, it may
be, are conscious of no unfamiliarity with their new
circumstances, but immediately become aware of an
insufferable strangeness in the world which they have
quitted. Death has not taken them away, but brought
them home.

The vicissitudes and mischances of sublunary
affairs, however, have not ceased to attend upon these
marble inhabitants; for I saw the upper fragment of a
sculptured lady, in a very old-fashioned garb, the
lower half of whom had doubtless been demolished by
Cromwell's soldiers when they took the Minster by
storm. And there lies the remnant of this devout lady
on her slab, ever since the outrage, as for centuries
before, with a countenance of divine serenity, and her
hands clasped in prayer, symbolizing a depth of
religious faith which no earthly turmoil or calamity
could disturb. Another piece of sculpture (apparently
a favorite subject in the Middle Ages, for I have seen
several like it in other cathedrals) was a reclining
skeleton, as faithfully representing an open-work of
bones as could well be expected in a solid block of
marble, and at a period, moreover, when the mysteries
of the human frame were rather to be guessed at than
revealed. Whatever the anatomical defects of his
production, the old sculptor had succeeded in making
it ghastly beyond measure. How much mischief has been
wrought upon us by this invariable gloom of the Gothic
imagination; flinging itself like a death-scented pall
over our conceptions of the future state, smothering
our hopes, hiding our sky, and inducing dismal efforts
to raise the harvest of immortality out of what is
most opposite to it,--the grave!

The cathedral service is performed twice every day:
at ten o'clock and at four. When I first entered,
the choristers (young and old, but mostly, I think,
boys, with voices inexpressibly sweet and clear, and
as fresh as bird-notes) were just winding up their
harmonious labors, and soon came thronging through a
side-door from the chancel into the nave. They were
all dressedin long
white robes, and looked like a peculiar order of
beings, created on purpose to hover between the roof
and pavement of that dim, consecrated edifice, and
illuminate it with divine melodies, reposing
themselves, meanwhile, on the heavy grandeur of the
organ-tones like cherubs on a golden cloud. All at
once, however, one of the cherubic multitude pulled
off his white gown, thus transforming himself before
my very eyes into a commonplace youth of the day, in
modern frock-coat and trousers of a decidedly
provincial cut. This absurd little incident, I verily
believe, had a sinister effect in putting me at odds
with the proper influences of the Cathedral, nor could
I quite recover a suitable frame of mind during my
stay there. But, emerging into the open air, I began
to be sensible that I had left a magnificent interior
behind me, and I have never quite lost the perception
and enjoyment of it in these intervening years.

A large space in the immediate neighborhood of the
Cathedral is called the Close, and comprises
beautifully kept lawns and a shadowy walk bordered by
the dwellings of the ecclesiastical dignitaries of the
diocese. All this row of episcopal, canonical, and
clerical residences has an air of the deepest quiet,
repose, and well-protected though not inaccessible
seclusion. They seemed capable of including
everything that a saint could desire, and a great many
more things than most of us sinners generally succeed
in acquiring. Their most marked feature is a
dignified comfort, looking as if no disturbance or
vulgar intrusiveness could ever cross their
thresholds, encroach upon their ornamented lawns, or
straggle into the beautiful gardens that surround them
with flower-beds and rich clumps of shrubbery. The
episcopal palace is a statelymansion of stone, built somewhat
in the Italian style, and bearing on its front the
figures 1687, as the date of its erection. A large
edifice of brick, which, if I remember, stood next to
the palace, I took to be the residence of the second
dignitary of the Cathedral; and, in that case, it must
have been the youthful home of Addison, whose father
was Dean of Lichfield. I tried to fancy his figure on
the delightful walk that extends in front of those
priestly abodes, from which and the interior lawns it
is separated by an open-work iron fence, lined with
rich old shrubbery, and overarched by a minster-aisle
of venerable trees. This path is haunted by the shades
of famous personages who have formerly trodden it.
Johnson must have been familiar with it, both as a
boy, and in his subsequent visits to Lichfield, an
illustrious old man. Miss Seward, connected with so
many literary reminiscences, lived in one of the
adjacent houses. Tradition says that it was a
favorite spot of Major André, who used to pace
to and fro under these trees, waiting, perhaps, to
catch a last angel-glimpse of Honoria Sneyd, before he
crossed the ocean to encounter his dismal doom from an
American court-martial. David Garrick, no doubt,
scampered along the path in his boyish days, and, if
he was an early student of the drama, must often have
thought of those two airy characters of the
"Beaux' Stratagem," Archer and Aimwell,
who, on this very ground, after attending service at
the Cathedral, contrive to make acquaintance with the
ladies of the comedy. These creatures of mere fiction
have as positive a substance now as the sturdy old
figure of Johnson himself. They live, while realities
have died. The shadowy walk still glistens with their
gold-embroidered memories.

Seeking for Johnson's birthplace, I found it
in St. Mary's Square, which is not so much a
square as the mere widening of a street. The house is
tall and thin, of three stories, with a square front
and a roof rising steep and high. On a side-view, the
building looks as if it had been cut in two in the
midst, there being no slope of the roof on that side.
A ladder slanted against the wall, and a painter was
giving a livelier hue to the plaster. In a corner-room
of the basement, where old Michael Johnson may be
supposed to have sold books, is now what we should
call a dry-goods store, or, according to the English
phrase, a mercer's and haberdasher's shop.
The house has a private entrance on a cross-street,
the door being accessible by several much-worn stone
steps, which are bordered by an iron balustrade. I set
my foot on the steps and laid my hand on the
balustrade, where Johnson's hand and foot must
many a time have been, and ascending to the door, I
knocked once, and again, and again, and got no
admittance. Going round to the shop-entrance, I tried
to open it, but found it as fast bolted as the gate of
Paradise. It is mortifying to be so balked in
one's little enthusiasms; but looking round in
quest of somebody to make inquiries of, I was a good
deal consoled by the sight of Dr. Johnson himself, who
happened, just at that moment, to be sitting at his
ease nearly in the middle of St. Mary's Square,
with his face turned towards his father's house.

Of course, it being almost fourscore years since
the Doctor laid aside his weary bulk of flesh,
together with the ponderous melancholy that had so
long weighed him down, the intelligent reader will at
once comprehend that he was marble in his substance,
and seated in a marble chair, on an elevated stonepedestal. In short,
it was a statue, sculptured by Lucas, and placed here
in 1838, at the expense of Dr. Law, the reverend
chancellor of the diocese.

The figure is colossal (though perhaps not much
more so than the mountainous Doctor himself) and looks
down upon the spectator from its pedestal of ten or
twelve feet high, with a broad and heavy benignity of
aspect, very like in feature to Sir Joshua Reynolds's
portrait of Johnson, but calmer and sweeter in
expression. Several big books are piled up beneath his
chair, and, if I mistake not, he holds a volume in his
hand, thus blinking forth at the world out of his
learned abstraction, owl-like, yet benevolent at
heart. The statue is immensely massive, a vast
ponderosity of stone, not finely spiritualized, nor,
indeed, fully humanized, but rather resembling a great
stone-bowlder than a man. You must look with the eyes
of faith and sympathy, or, possibly, you might lose
the human being altogether, and find only a big stone
within your mental grasp. On the pedestal are three
bas-reliefs. In the first, Johnson is represented as
hardly more than a baby, bestriding an old man's
shoulders, resting his chin on the bald head, which he
embraces with his little arms, and listening earnestly
to the High-Church eloquence of Dr. Sacheverell. In
the second tablet, he is seen riding to school on the
shoulders of two of his comrades, while another boy
supports him in the rear. The third bas-relief
possesses, to my mind, a great deal of pathos, to
which my appreciative faculty is probably the more
alive, because I have always been profoundly impressed
by the incident here commemorated, and long ago tried
to tell it for the behoof of childish readers. It
shows Johnson in themarket-place of Uttoxeter, doing
penance for an act of disobedience to his father,
committed fifty years before. He stands bareheaded, a
venerable figure, and a countenance extremely sad and
woe-begone, with the wind and rain driving hard
against him, and thus helping to suggest to the
spectator the gloom of his inward state. Some
market-people and children gaze awe-stricken into his
face, and an aged man and woman, with clasped and
uplifted hand, seem to be praying for him. These
latter personages (whose introduction by the artist is
none the less effective, because, in queer proximity,
there are some commodities of market-day in the shape
of living ducks and dead poultry) I interpreted to
represent the spirits of Johnson's father and mother,
lending what aid they could to lighten his
half-century's burden of remorse.

I had never heard of the above-described piece of
sculpture before; it appears to have no reputation as
a work of art, nor am I at all positive that it
deserves any. For me, however, it did as much as
sculpture could, under the circumstances, even if the
artist of the Libyan Sibyl had wrought it, by reviving
my interest in the sturdy old Englishman, and
particularly by freshening my perception of a
wonderful beauty and pathetic tenderness in the
incident of the penance. So, the next day, I left
Lichfield for Uttoxeter, on one of the few purely
sentimental pilgrimages that I ever undertook, to see
the very spot where Johnson had stood. Boswell, I
think, speaks of the town (its name is pronounced
Yuteoxeter) as being about nine miles off from
Lichfield, but the county-map would indicate a greater
distance; and by rail, passing from one line to
another, it is as much as eighteen miles. I have
always had an idea of old Michael Johnsonsending his literary
merchandise by carrier's wagon, journeying to
Uttoxeter afoot on market-day morning, selling books
through the busy hours, and returning to Lichfield at
night. This could not possibly have been the case.

Arriving at the Uttoxeter station, the first
objects that I saw, with a green field or two between
them and me, were the tower and gray steeple of a
church, rising among red-tiled roofs and a few
scattered trees. A very short walk takes you from the
station up into the town. It had been my previous
impression that the market-place of Uttoxeter lay
immediately roundabout the church; and, if I remember
the narrative aright, Johnson, or Boswell in his
behalf, describes his father's book-stall as
standing in the market-place, close beside the sacred
edifice. It is impossible for me to say what changes
may have occurred in the topography of the town,
during almost a century and a half since Michael
Johnson retired from business, and ninety years, at
least, since his son's penance was performed. But
the church has now merely a street of ordinary width
passing around it, while the market-place, though near
at hand, neither forms a part of it nor is really
contiguous, nor would its throng and bustle be apt to
overflow their boundaries and surge against the
churchyard and the old gray tower. Nevertheless, a
walk of a minute or two brings a person from the
centre of the market-place to the church-door; and
Michael Johnson might very conveniently have located
his stall and laid out his literary ware in the corner
at the tower's base; better there, indeed, than
in the busy centre of an agricultural market. But the
picturesque arrangement and full impressiveness of the
story absolutely require that Johnson shall nothave done his penance
in a corner, ever so little retired, but shall have
been the very nucleus of the crowd,--the midmost man
of the market-place,--a central image of Memory and
Remorse, contrasting with and overpowering the petty
materialism around him. He himself, having the force
to throw vitality and truth into what persons
differently constituted might reckon a mere external
ceremony, and an absurd one, could not have failed to
see this necessity. I am resolved, therefore, that
the true site of Dr. Johnson's penance was in
the middle of the market-place.

That important portion of the town is a rather
spacious and irregularly shaped vacuity, surrounded by
houses and shops, some of them old, with red-tiled
roofs, others wearing a pretence of newness, but
probably as old in their inner substance as the rest.
The people of Uttoxeter seemed very idle in the warm
summer-day, and were scattered in little groups along
the sidewalks, leisurely chatting with one another,
and often turning about to take a deliberate stare at
my humble self; insomuch that I felt as if my genuine
sympathy for the illustrious penitent, and my many
reflections about him, must have imbued me with some
of his own singularity of mien. If their
great-grandfathers were such redoubtable starers in
the Doctor's day, his penance was no light one.
This curiosity indicates a paucity of visitors to the
little town, except for market purposes, and I
question if Uttoxeter ever saw an American before. The
only other thing that greatly impressed me was the
abundance of public-houses, one at every step or two:
Red Lions, White Harts, Bulls' Heads, Mitres,
Cross Keys, and I know not what besides. These are
probably for theaccommodation of the farmers and
peasantry of the neighborhood on market-day, and
content themselves with a very meagre business on
other days of the week. At any rate, I was the only
guest in Uttoxeter at the period of my visit, and had
but an infinitesimal portion of patronage to
distribute among such a multitude of inns. The reader,
however, will possibly be scandalized to learn what
was the first, and, indeed, the only important affair
that I attended to, after coming so far to indulge a
solemn and high emotion, and standing now on the very
spot where my pious errand should have been
consummated. I stepped into one of the rustic
hostleries and got my dinner,--bacon and greens, some
mutton-chops, juicier and more delectable than all
America could serve up at the President's table, and a
gooseberry pudding; a sufficient meal for six yeomen,
and good enough for a prince, besides a pitcher of
foaming ale, the whole at the pitiful small charge of
eighteen-pence!

Dr. Johnson would have forgiven me, for nobody had
a heartier faith in beef and mutton than himself. And
as regards my lack of sentiment in eating my
dinner,--it was the wisest thing I had done that day.
A sensible man had better not let himself be betrayed
into these attempts to realize the things which he has
dreamed about, and which, when they cease to be purely
ideal in his mind, will have lost the truest of their
truth, the loftiest and profoundest part of their
power over his sympathies. Facts, as we really find
them, whatever poetry they may involve, are covered
with a stony excrescence of prose, resembling the
crust on a beautiful sea-shell, and they never show
their most delicate and divinest colors until we shall
have dissolved away their grosser actualities by
steepingthem long
in a powerful menstruum of thought. And seeking to
actualize them again, we do but renew the crust. If
this were otherwise,--if the moral sublimity of a
great fact depended in any degree on its garb of
external circumstances, things which change and
decay,--it could not itself be immortal and
ubiquitous, and only a brief point of time and a
little neighborhood would be spiritually nourished by
its grandeur and beauty.

Such were a few of the reflections which I mingled
with my ale, as I remember to have seen an old quaffer
of that excellent liquor stir up his cup with a sprig
of some bitter and fragrant herb. Meanwhile I found
myself still haunted by a desire to get a definite
result out of my visit to Uttoxeter. The hospitable
inn was called the Nag's Head, and, standing
beside the market-place, was as likely as any other to
have entertained old Michael Johnson in the days when
he used to come hither to sell books. He, perhaps, had
dined on bacon and greens, and drunk his ale, and
smoked his pipe, in the very room where I now sat,
which was a low, ancient room, certainly much older
than Queen Anne's time, with a red-brick floor,
and a white-washed ceiling, traversed by bare, rough
beams, the whole in the rudest fashion, but extremely
neat. Neither did it lack ornament, the walls being
hung with colored engravings of prize oxen and other
pretty prints, and the mantel-piece adorned with
earthen-ware figures of shepherdesses in the Arcadian
taste of long ago. Michael Johnson's eyes might
have rested on that self-same earthen image, to
examine which more closely I had just crossed the
brick pavement of the room. And, sitting down again,
still as I sipped my ale, I glanced through the open
window into the sunny market-place,and wished that I could honestly
fix on one spot rather than another, as likely to have
been the holy site where Johnson stood to do his
penance.

How strange and stupid it is that tradition should
not have marked and kept in mind the very place! How
shameful (nothing less than that) that there should be
no local memorial of this incident, as beautiful and
touching a passage as can be cited out of any human
life! No inscription of it, almost as sacred as a
verse of Scripture on the wall of the church! No
statue of the venerable and illustrious penitent in
the market-place to throw a wholesome awe over its
earthiness, its frauds and petty wrongs, of which the
benumbed fingers of conscience can make no record, its
selfish competition of each man with his brother or
his neighbor, its traffic of soul-substance for a
little worldly gain! Such a statue, if the piety of
the people did not raise it, might almost have been
expected to grow up out of the pavement of its own
accord on the spot that had been watered by the rain
that dripped from Johnson's garments, mingled
with his remorseful tears.

Long after my visit to Uttoxeter, I was told that
there were individuals in the town who could have
shown me the exact, indubitable spot where Johnson
performed his penance. I was assured, moreover, that
sufficient interest was felt in the subject to have
induced certain local discussions as to the expediency
of erecting a memorial. With all deference to my
polite informant, I surmise that there is a mistake,
and decline, without further and precise evidence,
giving credit to either of the above statements. The
inhabitants know nothing, as a matter of general
interest, about the penance, and care nothing for the
scene of it. If the clergyman of the parish, for
example, hadever
heard of it, would he not have used the theme time and
again, wherewith to work tenderly and profoundly on
the souls committed to his charge? If parents were
familiar with it, would they not teach it to their
young ones at the fireside, both to insure reverence
to their own gray hairs, and to protect the children
from such unavailing regrets as Johnson bore upon his
heart for fifty years? If the site were ascertained,
would not the pavement thereabouts be worn with
reverential footsteps? Would not every town-born child
be able to direct the pilgrim thither? While waiting
at the station, before my departure, I asked a boy who
stood near me,--an intelligent and gentlemanly lad
twelve or thirteen years old, whom I should take to be
a clergyman's son,--I asked him if he had ever
heard the story of Dr. Johnson, how he stood an hour
doing penance near that church, the spire of which
rose before us. The boy stared and answered,--

"No!"

"Were you born in Uttoxeter?"

"Yes."

I inquired if no circumstance such as I had
mentioned was known or talked about among the
inhabitants.

"No," said the boy; "not that I ever
heard of."

Just think of the absurd little town, knowing
nothing of the only memorable incident which ever
happened within its boundaries since the old Britons
built it, this sad and lovely story, which consecrates
the spot (for I found it holy to my contemplation,
again, as soon as it lay behind me) in the heart of a
stranger from three thousand miles over the sea! It
but confirms what I have been saying, that sublime and
beautiful facts are best understood when etherealized
by distance.

PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON.

WE set out at a little past eleven, and made our
first stage to Manchester. We were by this time
sufficiently Anglicized to reckon the morning a bright
and sunny one; although the May sunshine was mingled
with water, as it were, and distempered with a very
bitter east-wind.

Lancashire is a dreary county (all, at least,
except its hilly portions), and I have never passed
through it without wishing myself anywhere but in that
particular spot where I then happened to be. A few
places along our route were historically interesting;
as, for example, Bolton, which was the scene of many
remarkable events in the Parliamentary War, and in the
market-square of which one of the Earls of Derby was
beheaded. We saw, along the wayside, the never-failing
green fields, hedges, and other monotonous features of
an ordinary English landscape. There were little
factory villages, too, or larger towns, with their
tall chimneys, and their pennons of black smoke, their
ugliness of brick-work, and their heaps of refuse
matter from the furnace, which seems to be the only
kind of stuff which Nature cannot take back to herself
and resolve into the elements, when man has thrown it
aside. These hillocks of waste and effete mineral
always disfigure the neighborhood of iron-mongering
towns, and, even after a considerable antiquity, are
hardly made decent with a little grass.

At a quarter to two we left Manchester by theSheffield and Lincoln
Railway. The scenery grew rather better than that
through which we had hitherto passed, though still by
no means very striking; for (except in the
show-districts, such as the Lake country, or
Derbyshire) English scenery is not particularly well
worth looking at, considered as a spectacle or a
picture. It has a real, homely charm of its own, no
doubt; and the rich verdure, and the thorough finish
added by human art, are perhaps as attractive to an
American eye as any stronger feature could be. Our
journey, however, between Manchester and Sheffield was
not through a rich tract of country, but along a
valley walled in by bleak, ridgy hills extending
straight as a rampart, and across black moorlands with
here and there a plantation of trees. Sometimes there
were long and gradual ascents, bleak, windy, and
desolate, conveying the very impression which the
reader gets from many passages of Miss
Bronté's novels, and still more from those
of her two sisters. Old stone or brick farm-houses,
and, once in a while, an old church-tower, were
visible; but these are almost too common objects to be
noticed in an English landscape.

On a railway, I suspect, what little we do see of
the country is seen quite amiss, because it was never
intended to be looked at from any point of view in
that straight line; so that it is like looking at the
wrong side of a piece of tapestry. The old highways
and foot-paths were as natural as brooks and rivulets,
and adapted themselves by an inevitable impulse to the
physiognomy of the country; and, furthermore, every
object within view of them had some subtile reference
to their curves and undulations; but the line of a
railway is perfectly artificial, and puts all
precedentthings at
sixes-and-sevens. At any rate, be the cause what it
may, there is seldom anything worth seeing within the
scope of a railway traveller's eye; and if there
were, it requires an alert marksman to take a flying
shot at the picturesque.

At one of the stations (it was near a village of
ancient aspect, nestling round a church, on a wide
Yorkshire moor) I saw a tall old lady in black, who
seemed to have just alighted from the train. She
caught my attention by a singular movement of the
head, not once only, but continually repeated, and at
regular intervals, as if she were making a stern and
solemn protest against some action that developed
itself before her eyes, and were foreboding terrible
disaster, if it should be persisted in. Of course, it
was nothing more than a paralytic or nervous
affection; yet one might fancy that it had its origin
in some unspeakable wrong, perpetrated half a lifetime
ago in this old gentlewoman's presence, either against
herself or somebody whom she loved still better. Her
features had a wonderful sternness, which, I presume,
was caused by her habitual effort to compose and keep
them quiet, and thereby counteract the tendency to
paralytic movement. The slow, regular, and inexorable
character of the motion--her look of force and
self-control, which had the appearance of rendering it
voluntary, while yet it was so fateful--have stamped
this poor lady's face and gesture into my memory;
so that, some dark day or other, I am afraid she will
reproduce herself in a dismal romance.

The train stopped a minute or two, to allow the
tickets to be taken, just before entering the
Sheffield station, and thence I had a glimpse of the
famous town of razors and penknives, enveloped in a
cloud ofits own
diffusing. My impressions of it are extremely vague
and misty,--or rather, smoky: for Sheffield seems to
me smokier than Manchester, Liverpool, or
Birmingham,--smokier than all England besides, unless
Newcastle be the exception. It might have been
Pluto's own metropolis, shrouded in sulphurous
vapor; and, indeed, our approach to it had been by the
Valley of the Shadow of Death, through a tunnel three
miles in length, quite traversing the breadth and
depth of a mountainous hill.

After passing Sheffield, the scenery became softer,
gentler, yet more picturesque. At one point we saw
what I believe to be the utmost northern verge of
Sherwood Forest,--not consisting, however, of
thousand-year oaks, extant from Robin Hood's days, but
of young and thriving plantations, which will require
a century or two of slow English growth to give them
much breadth of shade. Earl Fitzwilliam's
property lies in this neighborhood, and probably his
castle was hidden among some soft depth of foliage not
far off. Farther onward the country grew quite level
around us, whereby I judged that we must now be in
Lincolnshire; and shortly after six o'clock we caught
the first glimpse of the cathedral towers, though they
loomed scarcely huge enough for our preconceived idea
of them. But, as we drew nearer, the great edifice
began to assert itself, making us acknowledge it to be
larger than our receptivity could take in.

At the railway-station we found no cab (it being an
unknown vehicle in Lincoln), but only an omnibus
belonging to the Saracen's Head, which the driver
recommended as the best hotel in the city, and took us
thither accordingly. It received us hospitably, and
looked comfortable enough; though, like the hotels
ofmost old English
towns, it had a musty fragrance of antiquity, such as
I have smelt in a seldom-opened London church where
the broad-aisle is paved with tombstones. The house
was of an ancient fashion, the entrance into its
interior court-yard being through an arch, in the side
of which is the door of the hotel. There are long
corridors, an intricate arrangement of passages, an
up-and-down meandering of staircases, amid which it
would be no marvel to encounter some forgotten guest
who had gone astray a hundred years ago, and was still
seeking for his bedroom while the rest of his
generation were in their graves. There is no
exaggerating the confusion of mind that seizes upon a
stranger in the bewildering geography of a great
old-fashioned English inn.

This hotel stands in the principal street of
Lincoln, and within a very short distance of one of
the ancient city-gates, which is arched across the
public way, with a smaller arch for foot-passengers on
either side; the whole, a gray, time-gnawn, ponderous,
shadowy structure, through the dark vista of which you
look into the Middle Ages. The street is narrow, and
retains many antique peculiarities; though,
unquestionably, English domestic architecture has lost
its most impressive features, in the course of the
last century. In this respect, there are finer old
towns than Lincoln: Chester, for instance, and
Shrewsbury,--which last is unusually rich in those
quaint and stately edifices where the gentry of the
shire used to make their winter abodes, in a
provincial metropolis. Almost everywhere, nowadays,
there is a monotony of modern brick or stuccoed
fronts, hiding houses that are older than ever, but
obliterating the picturesque antiquity of the street.

Between seven and eight o'clock (it being
stillbroad daylight
in these long English days) we set out to pay a
preliminary visit to the exterior of the Cathedral.
Passing through the Stone Bow, as the city-gate close
by is called, we ascended a street which grew steeper
and narrower as we advanced, till at last it got to be
the steepest street I ever climbed,--so steep that any
carriage, if left to itself, would rattle downward
much faster than it could possibly be drawn up. Being
almost the only hill in Lincolnshire, the inhabitants
seem disposed to make the most of it. The houses on
each side had no very remarkable aspect, except one
with a stone portal and carved ornaments, which is now
a dwelling-place for poverty-stricken people, but may
have been an aristocratic abode in the days of the
Norman kings, to whom its style of architecture dates
back. This is called the Jewess's House, having
been inhabited by a woman of that faith who was hanged
six hundred years ago.

And still the street grew steeper and steeper.
Certainly, the Bishop and clergy of Lincoln ought not
to be fat men, but of very spiritual, saint-like,
almost angelic habit, if it be a frequent part of
their ecclesiastical duty to climb this hill; for it
is a real penance, and was probably performed as such,
and groaned over accordingly, in monkish times.
Formerly, on the day of his installation, the Bishop
used to ascend the hill barefoot, and was doubtless
cheered and invigorated by looking upward to the
grandeur that was to console him for the humility of
his approach. We, likewise, were beckoned onward by
glimpses of the cathedral towers; and, finally,
attaining an open square on the summit, we saw an old
Gothic gateway to the left hand, and another to the
right. The latter had apparently been a part of the
exterior defences ofthe Cathedral, at a time when the
edifice was fortified. The west front rose behind. We
passed through one of the side-arches of the Gothic
portal, and found ourselves in the Cathedral Close, a
wide, level space, where the great old Minster has
fair room to sit, looking down on the ancient
structures that surround it, all of which, in former
days, were the habitations of its dignitaries and
officers. Some of them are still occupied as such,
though others are in too neglected and dilapidated a
state to seem worthy of so splendid an establishment.
Unless it be Salisbury Close, however (which is
incomparably rich as regards the old residences that
belong to it), I remember no more comfortably
picturesque precincts round any other cathedral. But,
in truth, almost every cathedral close, in turn, has
seemed to me the loveliest, cosiest, safest, least
wind-shaken, most decorous, and most enjoyable shelter
that ever the thrift and selfishness of mortal man
contrived for himself. How delightful, to combine all
this with the service of the temple!

Lincoln Cathedral is built of a yellowish
brownstone, which appears either to have been largely
restored, or else does not assume the hoary, crumbly
surface that gives such a venerable aspect to most of
the ancient churches and castles in England. In many
parts, the recent restorations are quite evident; but
other, and much the larger portions, can scarcely have
been touched for centuries: for there are still the
gargoyles, perfect, or with broken noses, as the case
may be, but showing that variety and fertility of
grotesque extravagance which no modern imitation can
effect. There are innumerable niches, too, up the
whole height of the towers, above and around the
entrance, and all over the walls: most of them empty,
but a fewcontaining
the lamentable remnants of headless saints and angels.
It is singular what a native animosity lives in the
human heart against carved images, insomuch that,
whether they represent Christian saint or Pagan deity,
all unsophisticated men seize the first safe
opportunity to knock off their heads! In spite of all
dilapidations, however, the effect of the west front
of the Cathedral is still exceedingly rich, being
covered from massive base to airy summit with the
minutest details of sculpture and carving: at least,
it was so once; and even now the spiritual impression
of its beauty remains so strong, that we have to look
twice to see that much of it has been obliterated. I
have seen a cherry-stone carved all over by a monk, so
minutely that it must have cost him half a lifetime of
labor; and this cathedral-front seems to have been
elaborated in a monkish spirit, like that
cherry-stone. Not that the result is in the least
petty, but miraculously grand, and all the more so for
the faithful beauty of the smallest details.

An elderly man, seeing us looking up at the west
front, came to the door of an adjacent house, and
called to inquire if we wished to go into the
Cathedral; but as there would have been a dusky
twilight beneath its roof, like the antiquity that has
sheltered itself within, we declined for the present.
So we merely walked round the exterior, and thought it
more beautiful than that of York; though, on
recollection, I hardly deem it so majestic and mighty
as that. It is vain to attempt a description, or seek
even to record the feeling which the edifice inspires.
It does not impress the beholder as an inanimate
object, but as something that has a vast, quiet,
long-enduring life of its own,--a creation which man
did not build,though in some way or other it is
connected with him, and kindred to human nature. In
short, I fall straightway to talking nonsense, when I
try to express my inner sense of this and other
cathedrals.

While we stood in the close, at the eastern end of
the Minster, the clock chimed the quarters; and then
Great Tom, who hangs in the Rood Tower, told us it was
eight o'clock, in far the sweetest and mightiest
accents that I ever heard from any bell,--slow, and
solemn, and allowing the profound reverberations of
each stroke to die away before the next one fell. It
was still broad daylight in that upper region of the
town, and would be so for some time longer; but the
evening atmosphere was getting sharp and cool. We
therefore descended the steep street,--our younger
companion running before us, and gathering such
headway that I fully expected him to break his head
against some projecting wall.

In the morning we took a fly (an English term for
an exceedingly sluggish vehicle), and drove up to the
Minster by a road rather less steep and abrupt than
the one we had previously climbed. We alighted before
the west front, and sent our charioteer in quest of
the verger; but, as he was not immediately to be
found, a young girl let us into the nave. We found it
very grand, it is needless to say, but not so grand,
methought, as the vast nave of York Cathedral,
especially beneath the great central tower of the
latter. Unless a writer intends a professedly
architectural description, there is but one set of
phrases in which to talk of all the cathedrals in
England and elsewhere. They are alike in their great
features: an acre or two of stone flags for a
pavement; rows of vast columns supporting a vaulted
roof at a dusky height; greatwindows, sometimes richly bedimmed
with ancient or modern stained glass; and an
elaborately carved screen between the nave and
chancel, breaking the vista that might else be of such
glorious length, and which is further choked up by a
massive organ,--in spite of which obstructions you
catch the broad, variegated glimmer of the painted
east window, where a hundred saints wear their robes
of transfiguration. Behind the screen are the carved
oaken stalls of the Chapter and Prebendaries, the
Bishop's throne, the pulpit, the altar, and
whatever else may furnish out the Holy of Holies. Nor
must we forget the range of chapels (once dedicated to
Catholic saints, but which have now lost their
individual consecration), nor the old monuments of
kings, warriors, and prelates, in the side-aisles of
the chancel. In close contiguity to the main body of
the Cathedral is the Chapter-House, which, here at
Lincoln, as at Salisbury, is supported by one central
pillar rising from the floor, and putting forth
branches like a tree, to hold up the roof. Adjacent to
the Chapter-House are the cloisters, extending round a
quadrangle, and paved with lettered tombstones, the
more antique of which have had their inscriptions half
obliterated by the feet of monks taking their noontide
exercise in these sheltered walks, five hundred years
ago. Some of these old burial-stones, although with
ancient crosses engraved upon them, have been made to
serve as memorials to dead people of very recent date.

In the chancel, among the tombs of forgotten
bishops and knights, we saw an immense slab of stone
purporting to be the monument of Catherine Swynford,
wife of John of Gaunt; also, here was the shrine of
the little Saint Hugh, that Christian child who was
fabledto have been
crucified by the Jews of Lincoln. The Cathedral is not
particularly rich in monuments; for it suffered
grievous outrage and dilapidation, both at the
Reformation and in Cromwell's time. This latter
iconoclast is in especially bad odor with the sextons
and vergers of most of the old churches which I have
visited. His soldiers stabled their steeds in the nave
of Lincoln Cathedral, and hacked and hewed the monkish
sculptures, and the ancestral memorials of great
families, quite at their wicked and plebeian pleasure.
Nevertheless, there are some most exquisite and
marvellous specimens of flowers, foliage, and
grapevines, and miracles of stonework twined about
arches, as if the material had been as soft as wax in
the cunning sculptor's hands,--the leaves being
represented with all their veins, so that you would
almost think it petrified Nature, for which he sought
to steal the praise of Art. Here, too, were those
grotesque faces which always grin at you from the
projections of monkish architecture, as if the
builders had gone mad with their own deep solemnity,
or dreaded such a catastrophe, unless permitted to
throw in something ineffably absurd.

Originally, it is supposed, all the pillars of this
great edifice, and all these magic sculptures, were
polished to the utmost degree of lustre; nor is it
unreasonable to think that the artists would have
taken these further pains, when they had already
bestowed so much labor in working out their
conceptions to the extremest point. But, at present,
the whole interior of the Cathedral is smeared over
with a yellowish wash, the very meanest hue
imaginable, and for which somebody's soul has a bitter
reckoning to undergo.

In the centre of the grassy quadrangle about
whichthe cloisters
perambulate is a small, mean brick building, with a
locked door. Our guide,--I forgot to say that we had
been captured by a verger, in black, and with a white
tie, but of a lusty and jolly aspect,--our guide
unlocked this door, and disclosed a flight of steps.
At the bottom appeared what I should have taken to be
a large square of dim, worn, and faded oil-carpeting,
which might originally have been painted of a rather
gaudy pattern. This was a Roman tessellated pavement,
made of small colored bricks, or pieces of burnt clay.
It was accidentally discovered here, and has not been
meddled with, further than by removing the
superincumbent earth and rubbish.

Nothing else occurs to me, just now, to be recorded
about the interior of the Cathedral, except that we
saw a place where the stone pavement had been worn
away by the feet of ancient pilgrims scraping upon it,
as they knelt down before a shrine of the Virgin.

Leaving the Minster, we now went along a street of
more venerable appearance than we had heretofore seen,
bordered with houses, the high-peaked roofs of which
were covered with red earthen tiles. It led us to a
Roman arch, which was once the gateway of a
fortification, and has been striding across the
English street ever since the latter was a faint
village-path, and for centuries before. The arch is
about four hundred yards from the Cathedral, and it is
to be noticed that there are Roman remains in all this
neighborhood, some above ground, and doubtless
innumerable more beneath it; for, as in ancient Rome
itself, an inundation of accumulated soil seems to
have swept over what was the surface of that earlier
day. The gateway which I am speaking about is probably
buried to a third of its height, and perhaps has as
perfect aRoman
pavement (if sought for at the original depth) as that
which runs beneath the Arch of Titus. It is a rude and
massive structure, and seems as stalwart now as it
could have been two thousand years ago; and though
Time has gnawed it externally, he has made what amends
he could by crowning its rough and broken summit with
grass and weeds, and planting tufts of yellow flowers
on the projections up and down the sides.

There are the ruins of a Norman castle, built by
the Conqueror, in pretty close proximity to the
Cathedral; but the old gateway is obstructed by a
modern door of wood, and we were denied admittance,
because some part of the precincts are used as a
prison. We now rambled about on the broad back of the
hill, which, besides the Minster and ruined castle, is
the site of some stately and queer old houses, and of
many mean little hovels. I suspect that all or most of
the life of the present day has subsided into the
lower town, and that only priests, poor people, and
prisoners dwell in these upper regions. In the wide,
dry moat, at the base of the castle-wall, are
clustered whole colonies of small houses, some of
brick, but the larger portion built of old stones
which once made part of the Norman keep, or of Roman
structures that existed before the Conqueror's
castle was ever dreamed about. They are like
toadstools that spring up from the mould of a decaying
tree. Ugly as they are, they add wonderfully to the
picturesqueness of the scene, being quite as valuable,
in that respect, as the great, broad, ponderous ruin
of the castle-keep, which rose high above our heads,
heaving its huge, gray mass out of a bank of green
foliage and ornamental shrubbery, such as lilacs, and
other flowering plants, in which its foundations were
completely hidden.

After walking quite round the castle, I made an
excursion through the Roman gateway, along a pleasant
and level road bordered with dwellings of various
character. One or two were houses of gentility, with
delightful and shadowy lawns before them; many had
those high, red-tiled roofs, ascending into acutely
pointed gables, which seem to belong to the same epoch
as some of the edifices in our own earlier towns; and
there were pleasant-looking cottages, very sylvan and
rural, with hedges so dense and high, fencing them in,
as almost to hide them up to the eaves of their
thatched roofs. In front of one of these I saw various
images, crosses, and relics of antiquity, among which
were fragments of old Catholic tombstones, disposed by
way of ornament.

We now went home to the Saracen's Head; and as
the weather was very unpropitious, and it sprinkled a
little now and then, I would gladly have felt myself
released from further thraldom to the Cathedral. But
it had taken possession of me, and would not let me be
at rest; so at length I found myself compelled to
climb the hill again between daylight and dusk. A mist
was now hovering about the upper height of the great
central tower, so as to dim and half obliterate its
battlements and pinnacles, even while I stood in the
close beneath it. It was the most impressive view that
I had had. The whole lower part of the structure was
seen with perfect distinctness; but at the very summit
the mist was so dense as to form an actual cloud, as
well defined as ever I saw resting on a mountain-top.
Really and literally, here was a "cloud-capt
tower."

The entire Cathedral, too, transfigured itself into
a richer beauty and more imposing majesty than ever.The longer I looked,
the better I loved it. Its exterior is certainly far
more beautiful than that of York Minster; and its
finer effect is due, I think, to the many peaks in
which the structure ascends, and to the pinnacles
which, as it were, repeat and reëcho them into
the sky. York Cathedral is comparatively square and
angular in its general effect; but in this at Lincoln
there is a continual mystery of variety, so that at
every glance you are aware of a change, and a
disclosure of something new, yet working an harmonious
development of what you have heretofore seen. The west
front is unspeakably grand, and may be read over and
over again forever, and still show undetected
meanings, like a great, broad page of marvellous
writing in black-letter,--so many sculptured ornaments
there are, blossoming out before your eyes, and gray
statues that have grown there since you looked last,
and empty niches, and a hundred airy canopies beneath
which carved images used to be, and where they will
show themselves again, if you gaze long enough.--But
I will not say another word about the Cathedral.

We spent the rest of the day within the sombre
precincts of the Saracen's Head, reading
yesterday's "Times," "The
Guide-Book of Lincoln," and "The Directory
of the Eastern Counties." Dismal as the weather
was, the street beneath our window was enlivened with
a great bustle and turmoil of people all the evening,
because it was Saturday night, and they had
accomplished their week's toil, received their
wages, and were making their small purchases against
Sunday, and enjoying themselves as well as they knew
how. A band of music passed to and fro several times,
with the rain-drops falling into the mouth of thebrazen trumpet and
pattering on the bass-drum; a spirit-shop, opposite
the hotel, had a vast run of custom; and a
coffee-dealer, in the open air, found occasional vent
for his commodity, in spite of the cold water that
dripped into the cups. The whole breadth of the
street, between the Stone Bow and the bridge across
the Witham, was thronged to overflowing, and humming
with human life.

Observing in the Guide-Book that a steamer runs on
the river Witham between Lincoln and Boston, I
inquired of the waiter, and learned that she was to
start on Monday at ten o'clock. Thinking it might
be an interesting trip, and a pleasant variation of
our customary mode of travel, we determined to make
the voyage. The Witham flows through Lincoln, crossing
the main street under an arched bridge of Gothic
construction, a little below the Saracen's Head. It
has more the appearance of a canal than of a river, in
its passage through the town,--being bordered with
hewn-stone mason-work on each side, and provided with
one or two locks. The steamer proved to be small,
dirty, and altogether inconvenient. The early morning
had been bright but the sky now lowered upon us with a
sulky English temper, and we had not long put off
before we felt an ugly wind from the German Ocean
blowing right in our teeth. There were a number of
passengers on board, country-people, such as travel by
third-class on the railway; for, I suppose, nobody but
ourselves ever dreamt of voyaging by the steamer for
the sake of what he might happen upon in the way of
river-scenery.

We bothered a good while about getting through a
preliminary lock; nor, when fairly under way, did we
ever accomplish, I think, six miles an hour.
Constantdelays were
caused, moreover, by stopping to take up passengers
and freight,--not at regular landing-places, but
anywhere along the green banks. The scenery was
identical with that of the railway, because the latter
runs along by the river-side through the whole
distance, or nowhere departs from it except to make a
short cut across some sinuosity; so that our only
advantage lay in the drawling, snail-like slothfulness
of our progress, which allowed us time enough and to
spare for the objects along the shore. Unfortunately,
there was nothing, or next to nothing, to be
seen,--the country being one unvaried level over the
whole thirty miles of our voyage,--not a hill in sight
either near or far, except that solitary one on the
summit of which we had left Lincoln Cathedral. And the
Cathedral was our landmark for four hours or more, and
at last rather faded out than was hidden by any
intervening object.

It would have been a pleasantly lazy day enough, if
the rough and bitter wind had not blown directly in
our faces, and chilled us through, in spite of the
sunshine that soon succeeded a sprinkle or two of
rain. These English east-winds, which prevail from
February till June, are greater nuisances than the
east-wind of our own Atlantic coast, although they do
not bring mist and storm, as with us, but some of the
sunniest weather that England sees. Under their
influence, the sky smiles and is villanous.

The landscape was tame to the last degree, but had
an English character that was abundantly worth our
looking at. A green luxuriance of early grass; old,
high-roofed farm-houses, surrounded by their stone
barns and ricks of hay and grain; ancient villages,
with the square, gray tower of a church seen afar
overthe level
country, amid the cluster of red roofs; here and there
a shadowy grove of venerable trees, surrounding what
was perhaps an Elizabethan hall, though it looked more
like the abode of some rich yeoman. Once, too, we saw
the tower of a mediæval castle, that of
Tattershall, built by a Cromwell, but whether of the
Protector's family I cannot tell. But the gentry
do not appear to have settled multitudinously in this
tract of country; nor is it to be wondered at, since a
lover of the picturesque would as soon think of
settling in Holland. The river retains its canal-like
aspect all along; and only in the latter part of its
course does it become more than wide enough for the
little steamer to turn itself round,--at broadest, not
more than twice that width.

The only memorable incident of our voyage happened
when a mother-duck was leading her little fleet of
five ducklings across the river, just as our steamer
went swaggering by, stirring the quiet stream into
great waves that lashed the banks on either side. I
saw the imminence of the catastrophe, and hurried to
the stern of the boat to witness its consummation,
since I could not possibly avert it. The poor
ducklings had uttered their baby-quacks, and striven
with all their tiny might to escape; four of them, I
believe, were washed aside and thrown off unhurt from
the steamer's prow; but the fifth must have gone
under the whole length of the keel, and never could
have come up alive.

At last, in mid-afternoon, we beheld the tall tower
of Saint Botolph's Church (three hundred feet
high, the same elevation as tie tallest tower of
Lincoln Cathedral) looming in the distance. At about
half past four we reached Boston (which name has
beenshortened, in
the course of ages, by the quick and slovenly English
pronunciation, from Botolph's town), and were
taken by a cab to the Peacock, in the market-place.
It was the best hotel in town, though a poor one
enough; and we were shown into a small, stifled
parlor, dingy, musty, and scented with stale
tobacco-smoke,--tobacco-smoke two days old, for the
waiter assured us that the room had not more recently
been fumigated. An exceedingly grim waiter he was,
apparently a genuine descendant of the old Puritans of
this English Boston, and quite as sour as those who
people the daughter-city in New England. Our parlor
had the one recommendation of looking into the
market-place, and affording a sidelong glimpse of the
tall spire and noble old church.

In my first ramble about the town, chance led me to
the river-side, at that quarter where the port is
situated. Here were long buildings of an old-fashioned
aspect, seemingly warehouses, with windows in the
high, steep roofs. The Custom House found ample
accommodation within an ordinary dwelling-house. Two
or three large schooners were moored along the
river's brink, which had here a stone margin;
another large and handsome schooner was evidently just
finished, rigged and equipped for her first voyage;
the rudiments of another were on the stocks, in a
ship-yard bordering on the river. Still another, while
I was looking on, came up the stream, and lowered her
mainsail, from a foreign voyage. An old man on the
bank hailed her and inquired about her cargo; but the
Lincolnshire people have such a queer way of talking
English that I could not understand the reply.
Farther down the river, I saw a brig, approaching
rapidly under sail. The whole scene made an oddimpression of bustle,
and sluggishness, and decay, and a remnant of
wholesome life; and I could not but contrast it with
the mighty and populous activity of our own Boston,
which was once the feeble infant of this old English
town,--the latter, perhaps, almost stationary ever
since that day, as if the birth of such an offspring
had taken away its own principle of growth. I thought
of Long Wharf, and Faneuil Hall, and Washington
Street, and the Great Elm, and the State House, and
exulted lustily,--but yet began to feel at home in
this good old town, for its very name's sake, as
I never had before felt, in England.

The next morning we came out in the early sunshine
(the sun must have been shining nearly four hours,
however, for it was after eight o'clock), and
strolled about the streets, like people who had a
right to be there. The market-place of Boston is an
irregular square, into one end of which the chancel of
the church slightly projects. The gates of the
church-yard were open and free to all passengers, and
the common footway of the townspeople seems to lie to
and fro across it. It is paved, according to English
custom, with flat tombstones; and there are also
raised or altar tombs, some of which have armorial
bearings on them. One clergyman has caused himself and
his wife to be buried right in the middle of the
stone-bordered path that traverses the churchyard; so
that not an individual of the thousands who pass along
this public way can help trampling over him or her.
The scene, nevertheless, was very cheerful in the
morning sun: people going about their business in the
day's primal freshness, which was just as fresh
here as in younger villages; children with milk-pails
loitering over the burial-stones; school-boys playing
leap-frogwith the
altar-tombs; the simple old town preparing itself for
the day, which would be like myriads of other days
that had passed over it, but yet would be worth living
through. And down on the churchyard, where were buried
many generations whom it remembered in their time,
looked the stately tower of Saint Botolph; and it was
good to see and think of such an age-long giant
intermarrying the present epoch with a distant past,
and getting quite imbued with human nature by being so
immemorially connected with men's familiar
knowledge and homely interests. It is a noble tower;
and the jackdaws, evidently have pleasant homes in
their hereditary nests among its top-most windows, and
live delightful lives, flitting and cawing about its
pinnacles and flying buttresses. I should almost like
to be a jackdaw myself, for the sake of living up
there.

In front of the church, not more than twenty yards
off, and with a low brick wall between, flows the
river Witham. On the hither bank a fisherman was
washing his boat; and another skiff, with her sail
lazily half twisted, lay on the opposite strand. The
stream at this point is about of such width, that, if
the tall tower were to tumble over flat on its face,
its topstone might perhaps reach to the middle of the
channel. On the farther shore there is a line of
antique-looking houses, with roofs of red tile, and
windows opening out of them,--some of these dwellings
being so ancient, that the Reverend Mr. Cotton,
subsequently our first Boston minister, must have seen
them with his own bodily eyes when he used to issue
from the front-portal after service. Indeed, there
must be very many houses here, and even some streets,
that bear much the aspect that they did when the
Puritan divine paced solemnly among them.

In our rambles about town, we went into a
bookseller's shop to inquire if he had any description
of Boston for sale. He offered me (or, rather,
produced for inspection, not supposing that I would
buy it) a quarto history of the town, published by
subscription, nearly forty years ago. The bookseller
showed himself a well-informed and affable man, and a
local antiquary, to whom a party of inquisitive
strangers were a godsend. He had met with several
Americans, who, at various times, had come on
pilgrimages to this place, and he had been in
correspondence with others. Happening to have heard
the name of one member of our party, he showed us
great courtesy and kindness, and invited us into his
inner domicile, where, as he modestly intimated, he
kept a few articles which it might interest us to see.
So we went with him through the shop, up stairs, into
the private part of his establishment; and, really, it
was one of the rarest adventures I ever met with, to
stumble upon this treasure of a man, with his treasury
of antiquities and curiosities, veiled behind the
unostentatious front of a bookseller's shop, in a
very moderate line of village business. The two
up-stair rooms into which he introduced us were so
crowded with inestimable articles, that we were almost
afraid to stir for fear of breaking some fragile thing
that had been accumulating value for unknown
centuries.

The apartment was hung round with pictures and old
engravings, many of which were extremely rare.
Premising that he was going to show us something very
curious, Mr. Porter went into the next room and
returned with a counterpane of fine linen, elaborately
embroidered with silk, which so profusely covered the
linen that the general effect was as if themain texture were
silken. It was stained and seemed very old, and had an
ancient fragrance. It was wrought all over with birds
and flowers in a most delicate style of needlework,
and among other devices, more than once repeated, was
the cipher, M. S.,--being the initials of one of the
most unhappy names that ever a woman bore. This quilt
was embroidered by the hands of Mary Queen of Scots,
during her imprisonment at Fotheringay Castle; and
having evidently been a work of years, she had
doubtless shed many tears over it, and wrought many
doleful thoughts and abortive schemes into its
texture, along with the birds and flowers. As a
counterpart to this most precious relic, our friend
produced some of the handiwork of a former Queen of
Otaheite, presented by her to Captain Cook; it was a
bag, cunningly made of some delicate vegetable stuff,
and ornamented with feathers. Next, he brought out a
green silk waistcoat of very antique fashion, trimmed
about the edges and pocket-holes with a rich and
delicate embroidery of gold and silver. This (as the
possessor of the treasure proved, by tracing its
pedigree till it came into his hands) was once the
vestment of Queen Elizabeth's Lord Burleigh; but
that great statesman must have been a person of very
moderate girth in the chest and waist; for the garment
was hardly more than a comfortable fit for a boy of
eleven, the smallest American of our party, who tried
on the gorgeous waistcoat. Then, Mr. Porter produced
some curiously engraved drinking-glasses, with a view
of Saint Botolph's steeple on one of them, and
other Boston edifices, public or domestic, on the
remaining two, very admirably done. These crystal
goblets had been a present, long ago, to an old master
of the Free School from his pupils; andit is very rarely, I imagine, that
a retired schoolmaster can exhibit such trophies of
gratitude and affection, won from the victims of his
birch rod.

Our kind friend kept bringing out one unexpected
and wholly unexpectable thing after another, as if he
were a magician, and had only to fling a private
signal into the air, and some attendant imp would hand
forth any strange relic he might choose to ask for.
He was especially rich in drawings by the Old Masters,
producing two or three, of exquisite delicacy, by
Raphael, one by Salvator, a head by Rembrandt, and
others, in chalk or pen-and-ink, by Giordano,
Benvenuto Cellini, and hands almost as famous; and
besides what were shown us, there seemed to be an
endless supply of these art-treasures in reserve. On
the wall hung a crayon-portrait of Sterne, never
engraved, representing him as a rather young man,
blooming, and not uncomely; it was the worldly face of
a man fond of pleasure, but without that ugly, keen,
sarcastic, odd expression that we see in his only
engraved portrait. The picture is an original, and
must needs be very valuable; and we wish it might be
prefixed to some new and worthier biography of a
writer whose character the world has always treated
with singular harshness, considering how much it owes
him. There was likewise a crayon-portrait of
Sterne's wife, looking so haughty and unamiable,
that the wonder is, not that he ultimately left her,
but how he ever contrived to live a week with such an
awful woman.

After looking at these, and a great many more
things than I can remember, above stairs, we went down
to a parlor, where this wonderful bookseller opened an
old cabinet, containing numberless drawers, and
looking just fit to be the repository of suchknick-knacks as were
stored up in it. He appeared to possess more treasures
than he himself knew of, or knew where to find; but,
rummaging here and there, he brought forth things new
and old: rose-nobles, Victoria crowns, gold angels,
double sovereigns of George IV., two-guinea pieces of
George II.; a marriage-medal of the first Napoleon,
only forty-five of which were ever struck off, and of
which even the British Museum does not contain a
specimen like this, in gold; a brass medal, three or
four inches in diameter, of a Roman emperor; together
with buckles, bracelets, amulets, and I know not what
besides. There was a green silk tassel from the fringe
of Queen Mary's bed at Holyrood Palace. There
were illuminated missals, antique Latin Bibles, and
(what may seem of especial interest to the historian)
a Secret-Book of Queen Elizabeth, in manuscript,
written, for aught I know, by her own hand. On
examination, however, it proved to contain, not
secrets of state, but recipes for dishes, drinks,
medicines, washes, and all such matters of
housewifery, the toilet, and domestic quackery, among
which we were horrified by the title of one of the
nostrums, "How to kill a Fellow quickly"!
We never doubted that bloody Queen Bess might often
have had occasion for such a recipe, but wondered at
her frankness, and at her attending to these anomalous
necessities in such a methodical way. The truth is, we
had read amiss, and the Queen had spelt amiss: the
word was "Fellon,"--a sort of whitlow, --not
"Fellow."

Our hospitable friend now made us drink a glass of
wine, as old and genuine as the curiosities of his
cabinet; and, while sipping it, we ungratefully tried
to excite his envy, by telling him various things,interesting to an
antiquary and virtuoso, which we had seen in the
course of our travels about England. We spoke, for
instance, of a missal bound in solid gold and set
around with jewels, but of such intrinsic value as no
setting could enhance, for it was exquisitely
illuminated, throughout, by the hand of Raphael
himself. We mentioned a little silver case which once
contained a portion of the heart of Louis XIV. nicely
done up in spices, but, to the owner's horror and
astonishment, Dean Buckland popped the kingly morsel
into his mouth, and swallowed it. We told about the
black-letter prayer-book of King Charles the Martyr,
used by him upon the scaffold, taking which into our
hands, it opened of itself at the Communion Service;
and there, on the left-hand page, appeared a spot
about as large as a sixpence, of a yellowish or
brownish hue: a drop of the king's blood had fallen
there.

Mr. Porter now accompanied us to the church, but
first leading us to a vacant spot of ground where old
John Cotton's vicarage had stood till a very
short time since. According to our friend's
description, it was a humble habitation, of the
cottage order, built of brick, with a thatched roof.
The site is now rudely fenced in, and cultivated as a
vegetable garden. In the right-hand aisle of the
church there is an ancient chapel, which, at the time
of our visit, was in process of restoration, and was
to be dedicated to Mr. Cotton, whom these English
people consider as the founder of our American Boston.
It would contain a painted memorial-window, in honor
of the old Puritan minister. A festival in
commemoration of the event was to take place in the
ensuing July, to which I had myself received an
invitation, but I knew too well the painsand penalties incurred
by an invited guest at public festivals in England to
accept it. It ought to be recorded (and it seems to
have made a very kindly impression on our kinsfolk
here) that five hundred pounds had been contributed by
persons in the United States, principally in Boston,
towards the cost of the memorial-window, and the
repair and restoration of the chapel.

After we emerged from the chapel, Mr. Porter
approached us with the vicar, to whom he kindly
introduced us, and then took his leave. May a
stranger's benediction rest upon him! He is a most
pleasant man; rather, I imagine, a virtuoso than an
antiquary; for he seemed to value the Queen of
Otaheite's bag as highly as Queen Mary's
embroidered quilt, and to have an omnivorous appetite
for everything strange and rare. Would that we could
fill up his shelves and drawers (if there are any
vacant spaces left) with the choicest trifles that
have dropped out of Time's carpet-bag, or give
him the carpet-bag itself, to take out what he will!

The vicar looked about thirty years old, a
gentleman, evidently assured of his position (as
clergymen of the Established Church invariably are),
comfortable and well-to-do, a scholar and a Christian,
and fit to be a bishop, knowing how to make the most
of life without prejudice to the life to come. I was
glad to see such a model English priest so suitably
accommodated with an old English church. He kindly and
courteously did the honors, showing us quite round the
interior, giving us all the information that we
required, and then leaving us to the quiet enjoyment
of what we came to see.

The interior of St. Botolph's is very fine
andsatisfactory, as
stately, almost, as a cathedral, and has been
repaired--so far as repairs were necessary--in a
chaste and noble style. The great eastern window is of
modern painted glass, but is the richest, mellowest,
and tenderest modern window that I have ever seen: the
art of painting these glowing transparencies in
pristine perfection being one that the world has lost.
The vast, clear space of the interior church delighted
me. There was no screen,--nothing between the
vestibule and the altar to break the long vista; even
the organ stood aside,--though it by and by made us
aware of its presence by a melodious roar. Around the
walls there were old engraved brasses, and a stone
coffin, and an alabaster knight of Saint John, and an
alabaster lady, each recumbent at full length, as
large as life, and in perfect preservation, except for
a slight modern touch at the tips of their noses. In
the chancel we saw a great deal of oaken work,
quaintly and admirably carved, especially about the
seats formerly appropriated to the monks, which were
so contrived as to tumble down with a tremendous crash
if the occupant happened to fall asleep.

We now essayed to climb into the upper regions. Up
we went, winding and still winding round the circular
stairs, till we came to the gallery beneath the stone
roof of the tower, whence we could look, down and see
the raised Font, and my Talma lying on one of the
steps, and looking about as big as a
pocket-handkerchief. Then up again, up, up, up,
through a yet smaller staircase, till we emerged into
another stone gallery, above the jackdaws, and far
above the roof beneath which we had before made a
halt. Then up another flight, which led us into a
pinnacle of the temple, but not the highest; so,
retracing our steps,we took the right turret this
time, and emerged into the loftiest lantern, where we
saw level Lincolnshire, far and near, though with a
haze on the distant horizon. There were dusty roads, a
river, and canals, converging towards Boston, which--a
congregation of red-tiled roofs--lay beneath our feet,
with pygmy people creeping about its narrow streets.
We were three hundred feet aloft, and the pinnacle on
which we stood is a landmark forty miles at sea.

Content, and weary of our elevation, we descended
the corkscrew stairs and left the church; the last
object that we noticed in the interior being a bird,
which appeared to be at home there, and responded with
its cheerful notes to the swell of the organ. Pausing
on the church-steps, we observed that there were
formerly two statues, one on each side of the doorway;
the canopies still remaining and the pedestals being
about a yard from the ground. Some of Mr.
Cotton's Puritan parishioners are probably
responsible for the disappearance of these stone
saints. This doorway at the base of the tower is now
much dilapidated, but must once have been very rich
and of a peculiar fashion. It opens its arch through a
great square tablet of stone, reared against the front
of the tower. On most of the projections, whether on
the tower or about the body of the church, there are
gargoyles of genuine Gothic grotesqueness,--fiends,
beasts, angels, and combinations of all three; and
where portions of the edifice are restored, the modern
sculptors have tried to imitate these wild fantasies,
but with very poor success. Extravagance and absurdity
have still their law, and should pay as rigid
obedience to it as the primmest things on earth.

In our further rambles about Boston, we crossedthe river by a bridge,
and observed that the larger part of the town seems to
lie on that side of its navigable stream. The crooked
streets and narrow lanes reminded me much of Hanover
Street, Ann Street, and other portions of the North
End of our American Boston, as I remember that
picturesque region in my boyish days. It is not
unreasonable to suppose that the local habits and
recollections of the first settlers may have had some
influence on the physical character of the streets and
houses in the New England metropolis; at any rate,
here is a similar intricacy of bewildering lanes, and
numbers of old peaked and projecting-storied
dwellings, such as I used to see there. It is
singular what a home-feeling and sense of kindred I
derived from this hereditary connection and fancied
physiognomical resemblance between the old town and
its well-grown daughter, and how reluctant I was,
after chill years of banishment, to leave this
hospitable place, on that account. Moreover, it
recalled some of the features of another American
town, my own dear native place, when I saw the
seafaring people leaning against posts, and sitting on
planks, under the lee of warehouses,--or lolling on
longboats, drawn up high and dry, as sailors and old
wharf-rats are accustomed to do, in seaports of little
business. In other respects, the English town is more
village-like than either of the American ones. The
women and budding girls chat together at their doors,
and exchange merry greetings with young men; children
chase one another in the summer twilight; schoolboys
sail little boats on the river, or play at marbles
across the flat tombstones in the churchyard; and
ancient men, in breeches and long waistcoats, wander
slowly about the streets, with a certain familiarity
ofdeportment, as if
each one were everybody's grandfather. I have
frequently observed, in old English towns, that Old
Age comes forth more cheerfully and genially into the
sunshine than among ourselves, where the rush, stir,
bustle, and irreverent energy of youth are so
preponderant, that the poor, forlorn grandsires begin
to doubt whether they have a right to breathe in such
a world any longer, and so hide their silvery heads in
solitude. Speaking of old men, I am reminded of the
scholars of the Boston Charity School, who walk about
in antique, long-skirted blue coats, and
knee-breeches, and with hands at their necks,--perfect
and grotesque pictures of the costume of three
centuries ago.

On the morning of our departure, I looked from the
parlor-window of the Peacock into the market-place,
and beheld its irregular square already well covered
with booths, and more in process of being put up, by
stretching tattered sail-cloth on poles. It was
market-day. The dealers were arranging their
commodities, consisting chiefly of vegetables, the
great bulk of which seemed to be cabbages. Later in
the forenoon there was a much greater variety of
merchandise: basketwork, both for fancy and use;
twig-brooms, beehives, oranges, rustic attire; all
sorts of things, in short, that are commonly sold at a
rural fair. I heard the lowing of cattle, too, and the
bleating of sheep, and found that there was a market
for cows, oxen, and pigs, in another part of the town.
A crowd of towns-people and Lincolnshire yeomen
elbowed one another in the square; Mr. Punch was
squeaking in one corner, and a vagabond juggler tried
to find space for his exhibition in another: so that
my final glimpse of Boston was calculated to leave a
livelier impression than myformer ones. Meanwhile the tower
of Saint Botolph's looked benignantly down; and I
fancied it was bidding me farewell, as it did Mr.
Cotton, two or three hundred years ago, and telling me
to describe its venerable height, and the town beneath
it, to the people of the American city, who are partly
akin, if not to the living inhabitants of Old Boston,
yet to some of the dust that lies in its churchyard.

One thing more. They have a Bunker Hill in the
vicinity of their town; and (what could hardly be
expected of an English community) seem proud to think
that their neighborhood has given name to our first
and most widely celebrated and best remembered
battle-field.

NEAR OXFORD.

ON a fine morning in September we set out on an
excursion to Blenheim,--the sculptor and myself being
seated on the box of our four-horse carriage, two more
of the party in the dicky, and the others less
agreeably accommodated inside. We had no coachman, but
two postilions in short scarlet jackets and leather
breeches with top-boots, each astride of a horse; so
that, all the way along, when not otherwise attracted,
we had the interesting spectacle of their up-and-down
bobbing in the saddle. It was a sunny and beautiful
day, a specimen of the perfect English weather, just
warm enough for comfort,--indeed, a little too warm,
perhaps, in the noontide sun,--yet retaining a mere
spice or suspicion of austerity, which made it all the
more enjoyable.

The country between Oxford and Blenheim is not
particularly interesting, being almost level, or
undulating very slightly; nor is Oxfordshire,
agriculturally, a rich part of England. We saw one or
two hamlets, and I especially remember a picturesque
old gabled house at a turnpike-gate, and, altogether,
the wayside scenery had an aspect of old-fashioned
English life; but there was nothing very memorable
till we reached Woodstock, and stopped to water our
horses at the Black Bear. This neighborhood is called
New Woodstock, but has by no means the brand-new
appearance of an American town, being a large village
of stone houses, most of them pretty well time-worn
andweather-stained.
The Black Bear is an ancient inn, large and
respectable, with balustraded staircases, and
intricate passages and corridors, and queer old
pictures and engravings hanging in the entries and
apartments. We ordered a lunch (the most delightful of
English institutions, next to dinner) to be ready
against our return, and then resumed our drive to
Blenheim.

The park-gate of Blenheim stands close to the end
of the village street of Woodstock. Immediately on
passing through its portals we saw the stately palace
in the distance, but made a wide circuit of the park
before approaching it. This noble park contains three
thousand acres of land, and is fourteen miles in
circumference. Having been, in part, a royal domain
before it was granted to the Marlborough family, it
contains many trees of unsurpassed antiquity, and has
doubtless been the haunt of game and deer for
centuries. We saw pheasants in abundance, feeding in
the open lawns and glades; and the stags tossed their
antlers and bounded away, not affrighted, but only shy
and gamesome, as we drove by. It is a magnificent
pleasure-ground, not too tamely kept, nor rigidly
subjected within rule, but vast enough to have lapsed
back into nature again, after all the pains that the
landscape-gardeners of Queen Anne's time bestowed
on it, when the domain of Blenheim was scientifically
laid out. The great, knotted, slanting trunks of the
old oaks do not now look as if man had much
intermeddled with their growth and postures. The trees
of later date, that were set out in the Great
Duke's time, are arranged on the plan of the
order of battle in which the illustrious commander
ranked his troops at Blenheim; but the ground covered
is so extensive,and
the trees now so luxuriant, that the spectator is not
disagreeably conscious of their standing in military
array, as if Orpheus had summoned them together by
beat of drum. The effect must have been very formal a
hundred and fifty years ago, but has ceased to be
so,--although the trees, I presume, have kept their ranks
with even more fidelity than Marlborough's
veterans did.

One of the park-keepers, on horseback, rode beside
our carriage, pointing out the choice views, and
glimpses at the palace, as we drove through the
domain. There is a very large artificial lake (to say
the truth, it seemed to me fully worthy of being
compared with the Welsh lakes, at least, if not with
those of Westmoreland), which was created by
Capability Brown, and fills the basin that he scooped
for it, just as if Nature had poured these broad
waters into one of her own valleys. It is a most
beautiful object at a distance, and not less so on its
immediate banks; for the water is very pure, being
supplied by a small river, of the choicest
transparency, which was turned thitherward for the
purpose. And Blenheim owes not merely this
water-scenery, but almost all its other beauties, to
the contrivance of man. Its natural features are not
striking; but Art has effected such wonderful things
that the uninstructed visitor would never guess that
nearly the whole scene was but the embodied thought of
a human mind. A skilful painter hardly does more for
his blank sheet of canvas than the landscape-gardener,
the planter, the arranger of trees, has done for the
monotonous surface of Blenheim,--making the most of
every undulation,--flinging down a hillock, a big lump
of earth out of a giant's hand, wherever it was
needed,--putting in beauty as often as therewas a niche for
it,--opening vistas to every point that deserved to be
seen, and throwing a veil of impenetrable foliage
around what ought to be hidden;--and then, to be sure,
the lapse of a century has softened the harsh outline
of man's labors, and has given the place back to
Nature again with the addition of what consummate
science could achieve.

After driving a good way, we came to a battlemented
tower and adjoining house, which used to be the
residence of the Ranger of Woodstock Park, who held
charge of the property for the King before the Duke of
Marlborough possessed it. The keeper opened the door
for us, and in the entrance-hall we found various
things that had to do with the chase and woodland
sports. We mounted the staircase, through several
stories, up to the top of the tower, whence there was
a view of the spires of Oxford, and of points much
farther off,--very indistinctly seen, however, as is
usually the case with the misty distances of England.
Returning to the ground-floor, we were ushered into
the room in which died Wilmot, the wicked Earl of
Rochester, who was Ranger of the Park in Charles
II.'s time. It is a low and bare little room,
with a window in front, and a smaller one behind; and
in the contiguous entrance-room there are the remains
of an old bedstead, beneath the canopy of which,
perhaps, Rochester may have made the penitent end that
Bishop Burnet attributes to him. I hardly know what it
is, in this poor fellow's character, which
affects us with greater tenderness on his behalf than
for all the other profligates of his day, who seem to
have been neither better nor worse than himself. I
rather suspect that he had a human heart which never
quite died out of him, and the warmth of which is
still faintly perceptible amid the dissolute trash
which he left behind.

Methinks, if such good fortune ever befell a
bookish man, I should choose this lodge for my own
residence, with the topmost room of the tower for a
study, and all the seclusion of cultivated wildness
beneath to ramble in. There being no such possibility,
we drove on, catching glimpses of the palace in new
points of view, and by and by came to Rosamond's
Well. The particular tradition that connects Fair
Rosamond with it is not now in my memory; but if
Rosamond ever lived and loved, and ever had her abode
in the maze of Woodstock, it may well be believed that
she and Henry sometimes sat beside this spring. It
gushes out from a bank, through some old stone-work,
and dashes its little cascade (about as abundant as
one might turn out of a large pitcher) into a pool,
whence it steals away towards the lake, which is not
far removed. The water is exceedingly cold, and as
pure as the legendary Rosamond was not, and is fancied
to possess medicinal virtues, like springs at which
saints have quenched their thirst. There were two or
three old women and some children in attendance with
tumblers, which they present to visitors, full of the
consecrated water; but most of us filled the tumblers
for ourselves, and drank.

Thence we drove to the Triumphal Pillar which was
erected in honor of the Great Duke, and on the summit
of which he stands, in a Roman garb, holding a winged
figure of Victory in his hand, as an ordinary man
might hold a bird. The column is I know not how many
feet high, but lofty enough, at any rate, to elevate
Marlborough far above the rest of the world, and to be
visible a long way off; and it is so placed in
reference to other objects, that, wherever the hero
wandered about his grounds, and especially as heissued from his
mansion, he must inevitably have been reminded of his
glory. In truth, until I came to Blenheim, I never had
so positive and material an idea of what Fame really
is--of what the admiration of his country can do for a
successful warrior--as I carry away with me and shall
always retain. Unless he had the moral force of a
thousand men together, ibis egotism (beholding himself
everywhere, imbuing the entire soil, growing in the
woods, rippling and gleaming in the water, and
pervading the very air with his greatness) must have
been swollen within him like the liver of a Strasburg
goose. On the huge tablets inlaid into the pedestal of
the column, the entire Act of Parliament, bestowing
Blenheim on the Duke of Marlborough and his posterity,
is engraved in deep letters, painted black on the
marble ground. The pillar stands exactly a mile from
the principal front of the palace, in a straight line
with the precise centre of its entrance-hall; so that,
as already said, it was the Duke's principal
object of contemplation.

We now proceeded to the palace-gate, which is a
great pillared archway, of wonderful loftiness and
state, giving admittance into a spacious quadrangle.
A stout, elderly, and rather surly footman in livery
appeared at the entrance, and took possession of
whatever canes, umbrellas, and parasols he could get
hold of, in order to claim sixpence on our departure.
This had a somewhat ludicrous effect. There is much
public outcry against the meanness of the present Duke
in his arrangements for the admission of visitors
(chiefly, of course, his native countrymen) to view
the magnificent palace which their forefathers
bestowed upon his own. In many cases, it seems hard
that a private abode should be exposed to theintrusion of the
public merely because the proprietor has inherited or
created a splendor which attracts general curiosity;
insomuch that his home loses its sanctity and
seclusion for the very reason that it is better than
other men's houses. But in the case of Blenheim,
the public have certainly an equitable claim to
admission, both because the fame of its first
inhabitant is a national possession, and because the
mansion was a national gift, one of the purposes of
which was to be a token of gratitude and glory to the
English people themselves. If a man chooses to be
illustrious, he is very likely to incur some little
inconveniences himself, and entail them on his
posterity. Nevertheless, his present Grace of
Marlborough absolutely ignores the public claim above
suggested, and (with a thrift of which even the hero
of Blenheim himself did not set the example) sells
tickets admitting six persons at ten shillings; if
only one person enters the gate, he must pay for six;
and if there are seven in company, two tickets are
required to admit them. The attendants, who meet you
everywhere in the park and palace, expect fees on
their own private account,--their noble master
pocketing the ten shillings. But, to be sure, the
visitor gets his money's worth, since it buys him
the right to speak just as freely of the Duke of
Marlborough as if he were the keeper of the Cremorne
Gardens. [1]

[1]
The above was written two or three years
ago, or more; and the Duke of that day has since
transmitted his coronet to his successor, who, we
understand, has adopted much more liberal
arrangements. There is seldom anything to criticise
or complain of, as regards the facility of obtaining
admission to interesting private houses in England.

Passing through a gateway on the opposite side of
the quadrangle, we had before us the noble classicfront of the palace,
with its two projecting wings. We ascended the lofty
steps of the portal, and were admitted into the
entrance-hall, the height of which, from floor to
ceiling, is not much less than seventy feet, being the
entire elevation of the edifice. The hall is lighted
by windows in the upper story, and, it being a clear,
bright day, was very radiant with lofty sunshine, amid
which a swallow was flitting to and fro. The ceiling
was painted by Sir James Thornhill in some allegorical
design (doubtless commemorative of Marlborough's
victories), the purport of which I did not take the
trouble to make out,--contenting myself with the
general effect, which was most splendidly and
effectively ornamental.

We were guided through the show-rooms by a very
civil person, who allowed us to take pretty much our
own time in looking at the pictures. The collection is
exceedingly valuable,--many of these works of Art
having been presented to the Great Duke by the crowned
heads of England or the Continent. One room was all
aglow with pictures by Rubens; and there were works of
Raphael, and many other famous painters, any one of
which would be sufficient to illustrate the meanest
house that might contain it. I remember none of them,
however (not being in a picture-seeing mood), so well
as Vandyck's large and familiar picture of
Charles I. on horseback, with a figure and face of
melancholy dignity such as never by any other hand was
put on canvas. Yet, on considering this face of
Charles (which I find often repeated in half-lengths)
and translating it from the ideal into literalism, I
doubt whether the unfortunate king was really a
handsome or impressive-looking man: a high,
thin-ridged nose, a meagre, hatchet face,and reddish hair and
beard,--these are the literal facts. It is the
painter's art that has thrown such pensive and
shadowy grace around him.

On our passage through this beautiful suite of
apartments, we saw, through the vista of open
door-ways, a boy of ten or twelve years old coming
towards us from the farther rooms. He had on a straw
hat, a linen sack that had certainly been washed and
rewashed for a summer or two, and gray trousers a good
deal worn,--a dress, in short, which an American
mother in middle station would have thought too shabby
for her darling school-boy's ordinary wear. This
urchin's face was rather pale (as those of
English children are apt to be, quite as often as our
own), but he had pleasant eyes, an intelligent look,
and an agreeable boyish manner. It was Lord
Sunderland, grandson of the present Duke, and
heir--though not, I think, in the direct line--of the
blood of the great Marlborough, and of the title and
estate.

After passing through the first suite of rooms, we
were conducted through a corresponding suite on the
opposite side of the entrance-hall. These latter
apartments are most richly adorned with tapestries,
wrought and presented to the first Duke by a
sisterhood of Flemish nuns; they look like great,
glowing pictures, and completely cover the walls of
the rooms. The designs purport to represent the
Duke's battles and sieges; and everywhere we see
the hero himself, as large as life, and as gorgeous in
scarlet and gold as the holy sisters could make him,
with a three-cornered hat and flowing wig, reining in
his horse, and extending his leading-staff in the
attitude of command. Next to Marlborough, Prince
Eugene is the most prominent figure. In the way of
upholstery, therecan never have been anything more
magnificent than these tapestries; and, considered as
works of Art, they have quite as much merit as nine
pictures out of ten.

One whole wing of the palace is occupied by the
library, a most noble room, with a vast perspective
length from end to end. Its atmosphere is brighter and
more cheerful than that of most libraries: a wonderful
contrast to the old college-libraries of Oxford, and
perhaps less sombre and suggestive of thoughtfulness
than any large library ought to be; inasmuch as so
many studious brains as have left their deposit on the
shelves cannot have conspired without producing a very
serious and ponderous result. Both walls and ceiling
are white, and there are elaborate doorways and
fireplaces of white marble. The floor is of oak, so
highly polished that our feet slipped upon it as if it
had been New England ice. At one end of the room
stands a statue of Queen Anne in her royal robes,
which are so admirably designed and exquisitely
wrought that the spectator certainly gets a strong
conception of her royal dignity; while the face of the
statue, fleshy and feeble, doubtless conveys a
suitable idea of her personal character. The marble of
this work, long as it has stood there, is as white as
snow just fallen, and must have required most faithful
and religious care to keep it so. As for the volumes
of the library, they are wired within the cases, and
turn their gilded backs upon the visitor, keeping
their treasures of wit and wisdom just as intangible
as if still in the unwrought mines of human thought.

I remember nothing else in the palace, except the
chapel, to which we were conducted last, and where we
saw a splendid monument to the first Duke and Duchess,
sculptured by Rysbrach, at the cost, it issaid, of forty
thousand pounds. The design includes the statues of
the deceased dignitaries, and various allegorical
flourishes, fantasies, and confusions; and beneath
sleep the great Duke and his proud wife, their
veritable bones and dust, and probably all the
Marlboroughs that have since died. It is not quite a
comfortable idea, that these mouldy ancestors still
inhabit, after their fashion, the house where their
successors spend the passing day; but the adulation
lavished upon the hero of Blenheim could not have been
consummated, unless the palace of his lifetime had
become likewise a stately mausoleum over his
remains,--and such we felt it all to be, after gazing
at his tomb.

The next business was to see the private gardens.
An old Scotch under-gardener admitted us and led the
way, and seemed to have a fair prospect of earning the
fee all by himself; but by and by another respectable
Scotchman made his appearance and took us in charge,
proving to be the head-gardener in person. He was
extremely intelligent and agreeable, talking both
scientifically and lovingly about trees and plants, of
which there is every variety capable of English
cultivation. Positively, the Garden of Eden cannot
have been more beautiful than this private garden of
Blenheim. It contains three hundred acres, and by the
artful circumlocution of the paths, and the
undulations, and the skilfully interposed clumps of
trees, is made to appear limitless. The sylvan
delights of a whole country are compressed into this
space, as whole fields of Persian roses go to the
concoction of an ounce of precious attar. The world
within that garden-fence is not the same weary and
dusty world with which we outside mortals areconversant; it is a
finer, lovelier, more harmonious Nature; and the Great
Mother lends herself kindly to the gardener's will,
knowing that he will make evident the half-obliterated
traits of her pristine and ideal beauty, and allow her
to take all the credit and praise to herself. I doubt
whether there is ever any winter within that
precinct,--any clouds, except the fleecy ones of
summer. The sunshine that I saw there rests upon my
recollection of it as if it were eternal. The lawns
and glades are like the memory of places where one has
wandered when first in love.

What a good and happy life might be spent in a
paradise like this! And yet, at that very moment, the
besotted Duke (ah! I have let out a secret which I
meant to keep to myself; but the ten shillings must
pay for all) was in that very garden (for the guide
told us so, and cautioned our young people not to be
too uproarious), and, if in a condition for
arithmetic, was thinking of nothing nobler than how
many ten-shilling tickets had that day been sold.
Republican as I am, I should still love to think that
noblemen lead noble lives, and that all this stately
and beautiful environment may serve to elevate them a
little way above the rest of us. If it fail to do so,
the disgrace falls equally upon the whole race of
mortals as on themselves; because it proves that no
more favorable conditions of existence would eradicate
our vices and weaknesses. How sad, if this be so! Even
a herd of swine, eating the acorns under those
magnificent oaks of Blenheim, would be cleanlier and
of better habits than ordinary swine.

Well, all that I have written is pitifully meagre,
as a description of Blenheim; and I hate to leave it
without some more adequate expression of the nobleedifice, with its rich
domain, all as I saw them in that beautiful sunshine;
for, if a day had been chosen out of a hundred years,
it could not have been a finer one. But I must give
up the attempt; only further remarking that the finest
trees here were cedars, of which I saw one--and there
may have been many such--immense in girth, and not
less than three centuries old. I likewise saw a vast
heap of laurel, two hundred feet in circumference, all
growing from one root; and the gardener offered to
show us another growth of twice that stupendous size.
If the Great Duke himself had been buried in that
spot, his heroic heart could not have been the seed of
a more plentiful crop of laurels.

We now went back to the Black Bear, and sat down to
a cold collation, of which we ate abundantly, and
drank (in the good old English fashion) a due
proportion of various delightful liquors. A stranger
in England, in his rambles to various quarters of the
country, may learn little in regard to wines (for the
ordinary English taste is simple, though sound, in
that particular), but he makes acquaintance with more
varieties of hop and malt liquor than he previously
supposed to exist. I remember a sort of foaming stuff,
called hop-champagne, which is very vivacious, and
appears to be a hybrid between ale and bottled cider.
Another excellent tipple for warm weather is concocted
by mixing brown-stout or bitter ale with ginger-beer,
the foam of which stirs up the heavier liquor from its
depths, forming a compound of singular vivacity and
sufficient body. But of all things ever brewed from
malt (unless it be the Trinity Ale of Cambridge, which
I drank long afterwards, and which Barry Cornwall has
celebrated in immortal verse), commend me to the
Archdeacon, as the Oxfordscholars call it, in honor of the
jovial dignitary who first taught these erudite
worthies how to brew their favorite nectar. John
Barleycorn has given his very heart to this admirable
liquor; it is a superior kind of ale, the Prince of
Ales, with a richer flavor and a mightier spirit than
you can find elsewhere in this weary world. Much have
we been strengthened and encouraged by the potent
blood of the Archdeacon!

A few days after our excursion to Blenheim, the
same party set forth, in two flies, on a tour to some
other places of interest in the neighborhood of
Oxford. It was again a delightful day; and, in truth,
every day, of late, had been so pleasant that it
seemed as if each must be the very last of such
perfect weather; and yet the long succession had given
us confidence in as many more to come. The climate of
England has been shamefully maligned, its sulkiness
and asperities are not nearly so offensive as
Englishmen tell us (their climate being the only
attribute of their country which they never
overvalue); and the really good summer-weather is the
very kindest and sweetest that the world knows.

We first drove to the village of Cumnor, about six
miles from Oxford, and alighted at the entrance of the
church. Here, while waiting for the keys, we looked at
an old wall of the churchyard, piled up of loose gray
stones, which are said to have once formed a portion
of Cumnor Hall, celebrated in Mickle's ballad and
Scott's romance. The hall must have been in very close
vicinity to the church,--not more than twenty yards
off; and I waded through the long, dewy grass of the
churchyard, and tried to peep over the wall, in hopes
to discover some tangible and traceable remains of the
edifice. But the wall was just too highto be overlooked, and difficult to
clamber over without tumbling down some of the stones;
so I took the word of one of our party, who had been
here before, that there is nothing interesting on the
other side. The churchyard is in rather a neglected
state, and seems not to have been mown for the benefit
of the parson's cow; it contains a good many
gravestones, of which I remember only some upright
memorials of slate to individuals of the name of
Tabbs.

Soon a woman arrived with the key of the
church-door, and we entered the simple old edifice,
which has the pavement of lettered tombstones, the
sturdy pillars and low arches, and other ordinary
characteristics of an English country church. One or
two pews, probably those of the gentlefolk of the
neighborhood, were better furnished than the rest, but
all in a modest style. Near the high altar, in the
holiest place, there is an oblong, angular, ponderous
tomb of blue marble, built against the wall, and
surmounted by a carved canopy of the same material;
and over the tomb, and beneath the canopy, are two
monumental brasses, such as we oftener see inlaid into
a church pavement. On these brasses are engraved the
figures of a gentleman in armor, and a lady in an
antique garb, each about a foot high, devoutly
kneeling in prayer; and there is a long Latin
inscription likewise cut into the enduring brass,
bestowing the highest eulogies on the character of
Anthony Forster, who, with his virtuous dame, lies
buried beneath this tombstone. His is the knightly
figure that kneels above; and if Sir Walter Scott ever
saw this tomb, he must have had an even greater. than
common disbelief in laudatory epitaphs, to venture on
depicting Anthony Forster in such hues as blacken him
in the romance. For my part, I read the inscriptionin full faith, and
believe the poor deceased gentleman to be a
much-wronged individual, with good grounds for
bringing an action of slander in the courts above.

But the circumstance, lightly as we treat it, has
its serious moral. What nonsense it is, this anxiety,
which so worries us about our good fame, or our bad
fame, after death! If it were of the slightest real
moment, our reputations would have been placed by
Providence more in our own power, and less in other
people's, than we now find them to be. If poor
Anthony Forster happens to have met Sir Walter in the
other world, I doubt whether he has ever thought it
worth while to complain of the latter's
misrepresentations.

We did not remain long in the church, as it
contains nothing else of interest; and, driving
through the village, we passed a pretty large and
rather antique-looking inn, bearing the sign of the
Bear and Ragged Staff. It could not be so old,
however, by at least a hundred years, as Giles
Gosling's time; nor is there any other object to
remind the visitor of the Elizabethan age, unless it
be a few ancient cottages, that are perhaps of still
earlier date. Cumnor is not nearly so large a village,
nor a place of such mark, as one anticipates from its
romantic and legendary fame; but, being still
inaccessible by railway, it has retained more of a
sylvan character than we often find in English country
towns. In this retired neighborhood the road is narrow
and bordered with grass, and sometimes interrupted by
gates; the hedges grow in unpruned luxuriance; there
is not that close-shaven neatness and trimness that
characterize the ordinary English landscape. The whole
scene conveys the idea of seclusion and remoteness. We
met no travellers, whether on foot or otherwise.

I cannot very distinctly trace out this day's
peregrinations; but, after leaving Cumnor a few miles
behind us, I think we came to a ferry over the Thames,
where an old woman served as ferryman, and pulled a
boat across by means of a rope stretching from shore
to shore. Our two vehicles being thus placed on the
other side, we resumed our drive,--first glancing,
however, at the old woman's antique cottage, with
its stone floor, and the circular settle round the
kitchen fireplace, which was quite in the
mediæval English style.

We next stopped at Stanton Harcourt, where we were
received at the parsonage with a hospitality which we
should take delight in describing, if it were
allowable to make public acknowledgment of the private
and personal kindnesses which we never failed to find
ready for our needs. An American in an English house
will soon adopt the opinion that the English are the
very kindest people on earth, and will retain that
idea as long, at least, as he remains on the inner
side of the threshold. Their magnetism is of a kind
that repels strongly while you keep beyond a certain
limit, but attracts as forcibly if you get within the
magic line.

It was at this place, if I remember right, that I
heard a gentleman ask a friend of mine whether he was
the author of "The Red Letter A"; and, after
some consideration (for he did not seem to recognize
his own book, at first, under this improved title),
our countryman responded, doubtfully, that he believed
so. The gentleman proceeded to inquire whether our
friend had spent much time in America,--evidently
thinking that he must have been caught young, and have
had a tincture of English breeding, at least, ifnot birth, to speak
the language so tolerably, and appear so much like
other people. This insular narrowness is exceedingly
queer, and of very frequent occurrence, and is quite
as much a characteristic of men of education and
culture as of clowns.

Stanton Harcourt is a very curious old place. It
was formerly the seat of the ancient family of
Harcourt, which now has its principal abode at Nuneham
Courtney, a few miles off. The parsonage is a relic of
the family mansion, or castle, other portions of which
are close at hand; for, across the garden, rise two
gray towers, both of them picturesquely venerable, and
interesting for more than their antiquity. One of
these towers, in its entire capacity, from height to
depth, constituted the kitchen of the ancient castle,
and is still used for domestic purposes, although it
has not, nor ever had, a chimney; or, we might rather
say, it is itself one vast chimney, with a hearth of
thirty feet square, and a flue and aperture of the
same size. There are two huge fireplaces within, and
the interior walls of the tower are blackened with the
smoke that for centuries used to gush forth from them,
and climb upward, seeking an exit through some wide
air-holes in the conical roof, full seventy feet
above. These lofty openings were capable of being so
arranged, with reference to the wind, that the cooks
are said to have been seldom troubled by the smoke;
and here, no doubt, they were accustomed to roast oxen
whole, with as little fuss and ado as a modern cook
would roast a fowl. The inside of the tower is very
dim and sombre (being nothing but rough stone walls,
lighted only from the apertures above mentioned), and
has still a pungent odor of smoke and soot, the
reminiscence of the fires and feasts ofgenerations that have passed away.
Methinks the extremest range of domestic economy lies
between an American cooking-stove and the ancient
kitchen, seventy dizzy feet in height and all one
fireplace, of Stanton Harcourt.

Now--the place being without a parallel in England,
and therefore necessarily beyond the experience of an
American--it is somewhat remarkable, that, while we
stood gazing at this kitchen, I was haunted and
perplexed by an idea that somewhere or other I had
seen just this strange spectacle before. The height,
the blackness, the dismal void, before my eyes, seemed
as familiar as the decorous neatness of my
grandmother's kitchen; only my unaccountable
memory of the scene was lighted up with an image of
lurid fires blazing all round the dim interior circuit
of the tower. I had never before had so pertinacious
an attack, as I could not but suppose it, of that odd
state of mind wherein we fitfully and teasingly
remember some previous scene or incident, of which the
one now passing appears to be but the echo and
reduplication. Though the explanation of the mystery
did not for some time occur to me, I may as well
conclude the matter here. In a letter of Pope's,
addressed to the Duke of Buckingham, there is an
account of Stanton Harcourt (as I now find, although
the name is not mentioned), where he resided while
translating a part of the "Iliad." It is one
of the most admirable pieces of description in the
language,--playful and picturesque, with fine touches
of humorous pathos,--and conveys as perfect a picture
as ever was drawn of a decayed English country-house;
and among other rooms, most of which have since
crumbled down and disappeared, he dashes off the grim
aspect of thiskitchen,--which, moreover, he
peoples with witches, engaging Satan himself as
head-cook, who stirs the infernal caldrons that seethe
and bubble over the fires. This letter, and others
relative to his abode here, were very familiar to my
earlier reading, and, remaining still fresh at the
bottom of my memory, caused the weird and ghostly
sensation that came over me on beholding the real
spectacle that had formerly been made so vivid to my
imagination.

Our next visit was to the church, which stands
close by, and is quite as ancient as the remnants of
the castle. In a chapel or side-aisle, dedicated to
the Harcourts, are found some very interesting family
monuments,--and among them, recumbent on a tombstone,
the figure of an armed knight of the Lancastrian
party, who was slain in the Wars of the Roses. His
features, dress, and armor are painted in colors,
still wonderfully fresh, and there still blushes the
symbol of the Red Rose, denoting the faction for which
he fought and died. His head rests on a marble or
alabaster helmet; and on the tomb lies the veritable
helmet, it is to be presumed, which he wore in
battle,--a ponderous iron case, with the visor
complete, and remnants of the gilding that once
covered it. The crest is a large peacock, not of
metal, but of wood. Very possibly, this helmet was
but an heraldic adornment of his tomb; and, indeed, it
seems strange that it has not been stolen before now,
especially in Cromwell's time, when knightly tombs
were little respected, and when armor was in request.
However, it is needless to dispute with the dead
knight about the identity of his iron pot, and we may
as well allow it to be the very same that so often
gave him the headache in his lifetime. Leaning against
the wall, at the foot of thetomb, is the shaft of a spear,
with a wofully tattered and utterly faded banner
appended to it,--the knightly banner beneath which he
marshalled his followers in the field. As it was
absolutely falling to pieces, I tore off one little bit,
no bigger than a finger-nail, and put it into my
waistcoat-pocket; but seeking it subsequently, it was
not to be found.

On the opposite side of the little chapel, two or
three yards from this tomb, is another monument, on
which lie, side by side, one of the same knightly race
of Harcourts, and his lady. The tradition of the
family is, that this knight was the standard-bearer of
Henry of Richmond in the Battle of Bosworth Field; and
a banner, supposed to be the same that he carried, now
droops over his effigy. It is just such a colorless
silk rag as the one already described. The knight has
the order of the Garter on his knee, and the lady
wears it on her left arm,--an odd place enough for a
garter; but, if worn in its proper locality, it could
not be decorously visible. The complete preservation
and good condition of these statues, even to the
minutest adornment of the sculpture, and their very
noses,--the most vulnerable part of a marble man, as
of a living one,--are miraculous. Except in
Westminster Abbey, among the chapels of the kings, I
have seen none so well preserved. Perhaps they owe it
to the loyalty of Oxfordshire, diffused throughout its
neighborhood by the influence of the University,
during the great Civil War and the rule of the
Parliament. It speaks well, too, for the upright and
kindly character of this old family, that the
peasantry, among whom they had lived for ages, did not
desecrate their tombs, when it might have been done
with impunity.

There are other and more recent memorials of theHarcourts, one of
which is the tomb of the last lord, who died about a
hundred years ago. His figure, like those of his
ancestors, lies on the top of his tomb, clad, not in
armor, but in his robes as a peer. The title is now
extinct, but the family survives in a younger branch,
and still holds this patrimonial estate, though they
have long since quitted it as a residence.

We next went to see the ancient fish-ponds
appertaining to the mansion, and which used to be of
vast dietary importance to the family in Catholic
times, and when fish was not otherwise attainable.
There are two or three, or more, of these reservoirs,
one of which is of very respectable size,--large
enough, indeed, to be really a picturesque object,
with its grass-green borders, and the trees drooping
over it, and the towers of the castle and the church
reflected within the weed-grown depths of its smooth
mirror. A sweet fragrance, as it were, of ancient time
and present quiet and seclusion was breathing all
around; the sunshine of to-day had a mellow charm of
antiquity in its brightness. These ponds are said
still to breed abundance of such fish as love deep and
quiet waters; but I saw only some minnows, and one or
two snakes, which were lying among the weeds on the
top of the water, sunning and bathing themselves at
once.

I mentioned that there were two towers remaining of
the old castle: the one containing the kitchen we have
already visited; the other, still more interesting, is
next to be described. It is some seventy feet high,
gray and reverend, but in excellent repair, though I
could not perceive that anything had been done to
renovate it. The basement story was once the family
chapel, and is, of course, still a consecrated spot.
At one corner of the tower is a circular turret,
withinwhich a
narrow staircase, with worn steps of stone, winds
round and round as it climbs upward, giving access to
a chamber on each floor, and finally emerging on the
battlemented roof. Ascending this turret-stair, and
arriving at the third story, we entered a chamber, not
large, though occupying the whole area of the tower,
and lighted by a window on each side. It was
wainscoted from floor to ceiling with dark oak, and
had a little fireplace in one of the corners. The
window-panes were small and set in lead. The curiosity
of this room is, that it was once the residence of
Pope, and that he here wrote a considerable part of
the translation of Homer, and likewise, no doubt, the
admirable letters to which I have referred above. The
room once contained a record by himself, scratched
with a diamond on one of the window-panes (since
removed for safekeeping to Nuneham Courtney, where it
was shown me), purporting that he had here finished
the fifth book of the "Iliad" on such a day.

A poet has a fragrance about him, such as no other
human being is gifted withal; it is indestructible,
and clings for evermore to everything that he has
touched. I was not impressed, at Blenheim, with any
sense that the mighty Duke still haunted the palace
that was created for him; but here, after a century
and a half, we are still conscious of the presence of
that decrepit little figure of Queen Anne's time,
although he was merely a casual guest in the old
tower, during one or two summer months. However brief
the time and slight the connection, his spirit cannot
be exorcised so long as the tower stands. In my mind,
moreover, Pope, or any other person with an available
claim, is right in adhering to the spot, dead or
alive; for I never saw a chamber that I should like
better toinhabit,--so comfortably small, in
such a safe and inaccessible seclusion, and with a
varied landscape from each window. One of them looks
upon the church, close at hand, and down into the
green churchyard, extending almost to the foot of the
tower; the others have views wide and far, over a
gently undulating tract of country. If desirous of a
loftier elevation, about a dozen more steps of the
turret-stair will bring the occupant to the summit of
the tower,--where Pope used to come, no doubt, in the
summer evenings, and peep--poor little shrimp that he
was!--through the embrasures of the battlement.

From Stanton Harcourt we drove--I forget how
far--to a point where a boat was waiting for us upon
the Thames, or some other stream; for I am ashamed to
confess my ignorance of the precise geographical
whereabout. We were, at any rate, some miles above
Oxford, and, I should imagine, pretty near one of the
sources of England's mighty river. It was little
more than wide enough for the boat, with extended
oars, to pass,--shallow, too, and bordered with
bulrushes and water-weeds, which, in some places,
quite overgrew the surface of the river from bank to
bank. The shores were flat and meadow-like, and
sometimes, the boatman told us, are overflowed by the
rise of the stream. The water looked clean and pure,
but not particularly transparent, though enough so to
show us that the bottom is very much weed-grown; and I
was told that the weed is an American production,
brought to England with importations of timber, and
now threatening to choke up the Thames and other
English rivers. I wonder it does not try its
obstructive powers upon the Merrimack, the
Connecticut, or the Hudson,--not to speak of the St.
Lawrence or the Mississippi!

It was an open boat, with cushioned seats astern,
comfortably accommodating our party; the day continued
sunny and warm, and perfectly still; the boatman,
well trained to his business, managed the oars
skilfully and vigorously; and we went down the stream
quite as swiftly as it was desirable to go, the scene
being so pleasant, and the passing hours so thoroughly
agreeable. The river grew a little wider and deeper,
perhaps, as we glided on, but was still an
inconsiderable stream: for it had a good deal more
than a hundred miles to meander through before it
should bear fleets on its bosom, and reflect palaces
and towers and Parliament houses and dingy and sordid
piles of various structure, as it rolled to and fro
with the tide, dividing London asunder. Not, in truth,
that I ever saw any edifice whatever reflected in its
turbid breast, when the sylvan stream, as we beheld it
now, is swollen into the Thames at London.

Once, on our voyage, we had to land, while the
boatman and some other persons drew our skiff round
some rapids, which we could not otherwise have passed;
another time, the boat went through a lock. We,
meanwhile, stepped ashore to examine the ruins of the
old nunnery of Godstowe, where Fair Rosamond secluded
herself, after being separated from her royal lover.
There is a long line of ruinous wall, and a shattered
tower at one of the angles; the whole much
ivy-grown,--brimming over, indeed, with clustering
ivy, which is rooted inside of the walls. The nunnery
is now, I believe, held in lease by the city of
Oxford, which has converted its precincts into a
barn-yard. The gate was under lock and key, so that
we could merely look at the outside, and soon resumed
our places in the boat.

At three o'clock or thereabouts (or sooner or
later, --for I took little heed of time, and only
wished that these delightful wanderings might last
forever) we reached Folly Bridge, at Oxford. Here we
took possession of a spacious barge, with a house in
it, and a comfortable dining-room or drawing-room
within the house, and a level roof, on which we could
sit at ease, or dance if so inclined. These barges are
common at Oxford,--some very splendid ones being owned
by the students of the different colleges, or by
clubs. They are drawn by horses, like canal-boats; and
a horse being attached to our own barge, he trotted
off at a reasonable pace, and we slipped through the
water behind him, with a gentle and pleasant motion,
which, save for the constant vicissitude of cultivated
scenery, was like no motion at all. It was life
without the trouble of living; nothing was ever more
quietly agreeable. In this happy state of mind and
body we gazed at Christ Church meadows, as we passed,
and at the receding spires and towers of Oxford, and
on a good deal of pleasant variety along the banks:
young men rowing or fishing; troops of naked boys
bathing, as if this were Arcadia, in the simplicity of
the Golden Age; country-houses, cottages, water-side
inns, all with something fresh about them, as not
being sprinkled with the dust of the highway. We were
a large party now; for a number of additional guests
had joined us at Folly Bridge, and we comprised poets,
novelists, scholars, sculptors, painters, architects,
men and women of renown, dear friends, genial,
outspoken, open-hearted Englishmen,--all voyaging
onward together, like the wise ones of Gotham in a
bowl. I remember not a single annoyance, except,
indeed, that a swarm of wasps came aboard of us and
alighted on thehead
of one of our young gentlemen, attracted by the scent
of the pomatum which he had been rubbing into his
hair. He was the only victim, and his small trouble
the one little flaw in our day's felicity, to put
us in mind that we were mortal.

Meanwhile a table had been laid in the interior of
our barge, and spread with cold ham, cold fowl, cold
pigeon-pie, cold beef, and other substantial cheer,
such as the English love, and Yankees too,--besides
tarts, and cakes, and pears, and plums,--not
forgetting, of course, a goodly provision of port,
sherry, and champagne, and bitter ale, which is like
mother's milk to an Englishman, and soon grows equally
acceptable to his American cousin. By the time these
matters had been properly attended to, we had arrived
at that part of the Thames which passes by Nuneham
Courtney, a fine estate belonging to the Harcourts,
and the present residence of the family. Here we
landed, and, climbing a steep slope from the
river-side, paused a moment or two to look at an
architectural object, called the Carfax, the purport
of which I do not well understand. Thence we
proceeded onward, through the loveliest park and
woodland scenery I ever saw, and under as beautiful a
declining sunshine as heaven ever shed over earth, to
the stately mansion-house.

As we here cross a private threshold, it is not
allowable to pursue my feeble narrative of this
delightful day with the same freedom as heretofore;
so, perhaps, I may as well bring it to a close. I may
mention, however, that I saw the library, a fine,
large apartment, hung round with portraits of eminent
literary men, principally of the last century, most of
whom were familiar guests of the Harcourts. The house
itself is about eighty years old, and is built in
theclassic style,
as if the family had been anxious to diverge as far as
possible from the Gothic picturesqueness of their old
abode at Stanton Harcourt. The grounds were laid out
in part by Capability Brown, and seemed to me even
more beautiful than those of Blenheim. Mason the
poet, a friend of the house, gave the design of a
portion of the garden. Of the whole place I will not
be niggardly of my rude Transatlantic praise, but be
bold to say that it appeared to me as perfect as
anything earthly can be,--utterly and entirely
finished, as if the years and generations had done all
that the hearts and minds of the successive owners
could contrive for a spot they dearly loved. Such
homes as Nuneham Courtney are among the splendid
results of long hereditary possession; and we
Republicans, whose households melt away like
new-fallen snow in a spring morning, must content
ourselves with our many counterbalancing
advantages,--for this one, so apparently desirable to
the far-projecting selfishness of our nature, we are
certain never to attain.

It must not be supposed, nevertheless, that Nuneham
Courtney is one of the great show-places of England.
It is merely a fair specimen of the better class of
country-seats, and has a hundred rivals, and many
superiors, in the features of beauty, and expansive,
manifold, redundant comfort, which most impressed me.
A moderate man might be content with such a
home,--that is all.

And now I take leave of Oxford without even an
attempt to describe it,--there being no literary
faculty, attainable or conceivable by me, which can
avail to put it adequately, or even tolerably, upon
paper. It must remain its own sole expression; and
those whose sad fortune it may be never to behold it
have nobetter
resource than to dream about gray, weather-stained,
ivy-grown edifices, wrought with quaint Gothic
ornament, and standing around grassy quadrangles,
where cloistered walks have echoed to the quiet
footsteps of twenty generations,--lawns and gardens of
luxurious repose, shadowed with canopies of foliage,
and lit up with sunny glimpses through archways of
great boughs,--spires, towers, and turrets, each with
its history and legend,--dimly magnificent chapels,
with painted windows of rare beauty and brilliantly
diversified hues, creating an atmosphere of richest
gloom,--vast college-halls, high-windowed,
oaken-panelled, and hung round with portraits of the
men, in every age, whom the University has nurtured to
be illustrious,--long vistas of alcoved libraries,
where the wisdom and learned folly of all time is
shelved,--kitchens (we throw in this feature by way of
ballast, and because it would not be English Oxford
without its beef and beer), with huge fireplaces,
capable of roasting a hundred joints at once,--and
cavernous cellars, where rows of piled-up hogsheads
seethe and fume with that mighty malt-liquor which is
the true milk of Alma Mater: make all these things
vivid in your dream, and you will never know nor
believe how inadequate is the result to represent even
the merest outside of Oxford.

We feel a genuine reluctance to conclude this
article without making our grateful acknowledgments,
by name, to a gentleman whose overflowing kindness was
the main condition of all our sightseeings and
enjoyments. Delightful as will always be our
recollection of Oxford and its neighborhood, we partly
suspect that it owes much of its happy coloring to the
genial medium through which the objects werepresented to us,--to
the kindly magic of a hospitality unsurpassed, within
our experience, in the quality of making the guest
contented with his host, with himself, and everything
about him. He has inseparably mingled his image with
our remembrance of the Spires of Oxford.

SOME OF THE HAUNTS OF BURNS.

WE left Carlisle at a little past eleven, and
within the half-hour were at Gretna Green. Thence we
rushed onward into Scotland through a flat and dreary
tract of country, consisting mainly of desert and bog,
where probably the moss-troopers were accustomed to
take refuge after their raids into England. Anon,
however, the hills hove themselves up to view,
occasionally attaining a height which might almost be
called mountainous. In about two hours we reached
Dumfries, and alighted at the station there.

Chill as the Scottish summer is reputed to be, we
found it an awfully hot day, not a whit less so than
the day before; but we sturdily adventured through the
burning sunshine up into the town, inquiring our way
to the residence of Burns. The street leading from the
station is called Shakespeare Street; and at its
farther extremity we read "Burns Street" on
a corner-house,--the avenue thus designated having
been formerly known as "Mill-Hole Brae." It
is a vile lane, paved with small, hard stones from
side to side, and bordered by cottages or mean houses
of whitewashed stone, joining one to another along the
whole length of the street. With not a tree, of
course, or a blade of grass between the paving-stones,
the narrow lane was as hot as Tophet, and reeked with
a genuine Scotch odor, being infested with unwashed
children, and altogether in a state of chronic filth;
although some women seemed to be hopelesslyscrubbing the
thresholds of their wretched dwellings. I never saw an
outskirt of a town less fit for a poet's
residence, or in which it would be more miserable for
any man of cleanly predilections to spend his days.

We asked for Burns's dwelling; and a woman
pointed across the street to a two-story house, built
of stone, and whitewashed, like its neighbors, but
perhaps of a little more respectable aspect than most
of them, though I hesitate in saying so. It was not a
separate structure, but under the same continuous roof
with the next. There was an inscription on the door,
bearing no reference to Burns, but indicating that the
house was now occupied by a ragged or industrial
school. On knocking, we were instantly admitted by a
servant-girl, who smiled intelligently when we told
our errand, and showed us into a low and very plain
parlor, not more than twelve or fifteen feet square. A
young woman, who seemed to be a teacher in the school,
soon appeared, and told us that this had been
Burns's usual sitting-room, and that he had
written many of his songs here.

She then led us up a narrow staircase into a little
bedchamber over the parlor. Connecting with it, there
is a very small room, or windowed closet, which Burns
used as a study; and the bedchamber itself was the one
where he slept in his later lifetime, and in which he
died at last. Altogether, it is an exceedingly
unsuitable place for a pastoral and rural poet to live
or die in,--even more unsatisfactory than
Shakespeare's house, which has a certain homely
picturesqueness that contrasts favorably with the
suburban sordidness of the abode before us. The narrow
lane, the paving-stones, and the contiguity of
wretched hovels are depressing to remember; and the
steam ofthem (such
is our human weakness) might almost make the
poet's memory less fragrant.

As already observed, it was an intolerably hot day.
After leaving the house, we found our way into the
principal street of the town, which, it may be fair to
say, is of very different aspect from the wretched
outskirt above described. Entering a hotel (in which,
as a Dumfries guide-book assured us, Prince Charles
Edward had once spent a night), we rested and
refreshed ourselves, and then set forth in quest of
the mausoleum of Burns.

Coming to St. Michael's Church, we saw a man
digging a grave, and, scrambling out of the hole, he
let us into the churchyard, which was crowded full of
monuments. Their general shape and construction are
peculiar to Scotland, being a perpendicular tablet of
marble or other stone, within a framework of the same
material, somewhat resembling the frame of a
looking-glass; and, all over the churchyard, these
sepulchral memorials rise to the height of ten,
fifteen, or twenty feet, forming quite an imposing
collection of monuments, but inscribed with names of
small general significance. It was easy, indeed, to
ascertain the rank of those who slept below; for in
Scotland it is the custom to put the occupation of the
buried personage (as "Skinner," "Shoemaker,"
"Flesher") on his tombstone. As another peculiarity,
wives are buried under their maiden names, instead of
those of their husbands, thus giving a disagreeable
impression that the married pair have bidden each
other an eternal farewell on the edge of the grave.

There was a foot-path through this crowded
church-yard, sufficiently well worn to guide us to the
grave of Burns; but a woman followed behind us, who,
itappeared, kept
the key of the mausoleum, and was privileged to show
it to strangers. The monument is a sort of Grecian
temple, with pilasters and a dome, covering a space of
about twenty feet square. It was formerly open to all
the inclemencies of the Scotch atmosphere, but is now
protected and shut in by large squares of rough glass,
each pane being of the size of one whole side of the
structure. The woman unlocked the door, and admitted
us into the interior. Inlaid into the floor of the
mausoleum is the gravestone of Burns,--the very same
that was laid over his grave by Jean Armour, before
this monument was built. Displayed against the
surrounding wall is a marble statue of Burns at the
plough, with the Genius of Caledonia summoning the
ploughman to turn poet. Methought it was not a very
successful piece of work; for the plough was better
sculptured than the man, and the man, though heavy and
cloddish, was more effective than the goddess. Our
guide informed us that an old man of ninety, who knew
Burns, certifies this statue to be very like the
original.

The bones of the poet, and of Jean Armour, and of
some of their children, lie in the vault over which we
stood. Our guide (who was intelligent, in her own
plain way. and very agreeable to talk withal) said
that the vault was opened about three weeks ago, on
occasion of the burial of the eldest son of Burns. The
poet's bones were disturbed, and the dry skull,
once so brimming over with powerful thought and bright
and tender fantasies, was taken away, and kept for
several days by a Dumfries doctor. It has since been
deposited in a new leaden coffin, and restored to the
vault. We learned that there is a surviving daughter
of Burns's eldest son, and daughters likewise of
the twoyounger
sons,--and, besides these, an illegitimate posterity
by the eldest son, who appears to have been of
disreputable life in his younger days. He inherited
his father's failings, with some faint shadow, I have
also understood, of the great qualities which have
made the world tender of his father's vices and
weaknesses.

We listened readily enough to this paltry gossip,
but found that it robbed the poet's memory of
some of the reverence that was its due. Indeed, this
talk over his grave had very much the same tendency
and effect as the home-scene of his life, which we had
been visiting just previously. Beholding his poor,
mean dwelling and its surroundings, and picturing his
outward life and earthly manifestations from these,
one does not so much wonder that the people of that
day should have failed to recognize all that was
admirable and immortal in a disreputable, drunken,
shabbily clothed, and shabbily housed man, consorting
with associates of damaged character, and, as his only
ostensible occupation, gauging the whiskey, which he
too often tasted. Siding with Burns, as we needs
must, in his plea against the world, let us try to do
the world a little justice too. It is far easier to
know and honor a poet when his fame has taken shape in
the spotlessness of marble than when the actual man
comes staggering before you, besmeared with the sordid
stains of his daily life. For my part, I chiefly
wonder that his recognition dawned so brightly while
he was still living. There must have been something
very grand in his immediate presence, some strangely
impressive characteristic in his natural behavior, to
have caused him to seem like a demigod so soon.

As we went back through the churchyard, we saw aspot where nearly four
hundred inhabitants of Dumfries were buried during the
cholera year; and also some curious old monuments,
with raised letters, the inscriptions on which were
not sufficiently legible to induce us to puzzle them
out; but, I believe, they mark the resting-places of
old Covenanters, some of whom were killed by
Claverhouse and his fellow-ruffians.

St. Michael's Church is of red freestone, and
was built about a hundred years ago, on an old
Catholic foundation. Our guide admitted us into it,
and showed us, in the porch, a very pretty little
marble figure of a child asleep, with a drapery over
the lower part, from beneath which appeared its two
baby feet. It was truly a sweet little statue; and
the woman told us that it represented a child of the
sculptor, and that the baby (here still in its marble
infancy) had died more than twenty-six years ago.
"Many ladies," she said, "especially
such as had ever lost a child, had shed tears over
it." It was very pleasant to think of the
sculptor bestowing the best of his genius and art to
re-create his tender child in stone, and to make the
representation as soft and sweet as the original; but
the conclusion of the story has something that jars
with our awakened sensibilities. A gentleman from
London had seen the statue, and was so much delighted
with it that he bought it of the father-artist, after
it had lain above a quarter of a century in the
church-porch. So this was not the real, tender image
that came out of the father's heart; he had sold
that truest one for a hundred guineas, and sculptured
this mere copy to replace it. The first figure was
entirely naked in its earthly and spiritual innocence.
The copy, as I have said above, has a drapery overthe lower limbs. But,
after all, if we come to the truth of the matter, the
sleeping baby may be as fitly reposited in the
drawing-room of a connoisseur as in a cold and dreary
church-porch.

We went into the church, and found it very plain
and naked, without altar-decorations, and having its
floor quite covered with unsightly wooden pews. The
woman led us to a pew cornering on one of the
side-aisles, and, telling us that it used to be
Burns's family-pew, showed us his seat, which is
in the corner by the aisle. It is so situated, that a
sturdy pillar hid him from the pulpit, and from the
minister's eye; "for Robin was no great
friends with the ministers," said she. This
touch--his seat behind the pillar, and Burns himself
nodding in sermon-time, or keenly observant of profane
things--brought him before us to the life. In the
corner-seat of the next pew, right before Burns, and
not more than two feet off, sat the young lady on whom
the poet saw that unmentionable parasite which he has
immortalized in song. We were ungenerous enough to ask
the lady's name, but the good woman could not
tell it. This was the last thing which we saw in
Dumfries worthy of record; and it ought to be noted
that our guide refused some money which my companion
offered her, because I had already paid her what she
deemed sufficient.

At the railway-station we spent more than a weary
hour, waiting for the train, which at last came up,
and took us to Mauchline. We got into an omnibus, the
only conveyance to be had, and drove about a mile to
the village, where we established ourselves at the
Loudoun Hotel, one of the veriest country inns which
we have found in Great Britain. The town of Mauchline,
a place more redolent of Burns than almost anyother, consists of a
street or two of contiguous cottages, mostly
white-washed, and with thatched roofs. It has nothing
sylvan or rural in the immediate village, and is as
ugly a place as mortal man could contrive to make, or
to render uglier through a succession of untidy
generations. The fashion of paving the village street,
and patching one shabby house on the gable-end of
another, quite shuts out all verdure and pleasantness;
but, I presume, we are not likely to see a more
genuine old Scotch village, such as they used to be in
Burns's time, and long before, than this of
Mauchline. The church stands about midway up the
street, and is built of red freestone, very simple in
its architecture, with a square tower and pinnacles.
In this sacred edifice, and its churchyard, was the
scene of one of Burns's most characteristic
productions, "The Holy Fair."

Almost directly opposite its gate, across the
village street, stands Posie Nansie's inn, where
the "Jolly Beggars" congregated. The latter
is a two-story, red-stone, thatched house, looking
old, but by no means venerable, like a drunken
patriarch. It has small, old-fashioned windows, and
may well have stood for centuries,--though, seventy or
eighty years ago, when Burns was conversant with it, I
should fancy it might have been something better than
a beggars' alehouse. The whole town of Mauchline
looks rusty and time-worn,--even the newer houses, of
which there are several, being shadowed and darkened
by the general aspect of the place. When we arrived,
all the wretched little dwellings seemed to have
belched forth their inhabitants into the warm summer
evening: everybody was chatting with everybody, on the
most familiar terms; the barelegged children gambolled
orquarrelled
uproariously, and came freely, moreover, and looked
into the window of our parlor. When we ventured out,
we were followed by the gaze of the old town: people
standing in their doorways, old women popping their
heads from the chamber-windows, and stalwart men--idle
on Saturday at e'en, after their week's hard
labor--clustering at the street-corners, merely to
stare at our unpretending selves. Except in some
remote little town of Italy (where, besides, the
inhabitants had the intelligible stimulus of beggary),
I have never been honored with nearly such an amount
of public notice.

The next forenoon my companion put me to shame by
attending church, after vainly exhorting me to do the
like; and it being Sacrament Sunday, and my poor
friend being wedged into the farther end of a closely
filled pew, he was forced to stay through the
preaching of four several sermons, and came back
perfectly exhausted and desperate. He was somewhat
consoled, however, on finding that he had witnessed a
spectacle of Scotch manners identical with that of
Burns's "Holy Fair" on the very spot
where the poet located that immortal description. By
way of further conformance to the customs of the
country, we ordered a sheep's head and the broth,
and did penance accordingly; and at five o'clock we
took a fly, and set out for Burns's farm of Moss
Giel.

Moss Giel is not more than a mile from Mauchline,
and the road extends over a high ridge of land, with a
view of far hills and green slopes on either side.
Just before we reached the farm, the driver stopped to
point out a hawthorn, growing by the wayside, which he
said was Burns's "Lousie Thorn"; and I
devoutly plucked a branch, although I have really
forgottenwhere or
how this illustrious shrub has been celebrated. We
then turned into a rude gateway, and almost
immediately came to the farm-house of Moss Giel,
standing some fifty yards removed from the high-road,
behind a tall hedge of hawthorn, and considerably
overshadowed by trees. The house is a white-washed
stone cottage, like thousands of others in England and
Scotland, with a thatched roof, on which grass and
weeds have intruded a picturesque, though alien
growth. There is a door and one window in front,
besides another little window that peeps out among the
thatch. Close by the cottage, and extending back at
right angles from it, so as to enclose the farm-yard,
are two other buildings of the same size, shape, and
general appearance as the house: any one of the three
looks just as fit for a human habitation as the two
others, and all three look still more suitable for
donkey-stables and pigsties. As we drove into the
farm-yard, bounded on three sides by these three
hovels, a large dog began to bark at us; and some
women and children made their appearance, but seemed
to demur about admitting us, because the master and
mistress were very religious people, and had not yet
come back from the Sacrament at Mauchline.

However, it would not do to be turned back from the
very threshold of Robert Burns; and as the women
seemed to be merely straggling visitors, and nobody,
at all events, had a right to send us away, we went
into the back door, and, turning to the right, entered
a kitchen. It showed a deplorable lack of housewifely
neatness, and in it there were three or four children,
one of whom, a girl eight or nine years old, held a
baby in her arms. She proved to be the daughter of the
people of the house, and gave us what leave shecould to look about
us. Thence we stepped across the narrow mid-passage of
the cottage into the only other apartment below
stairs, a sitting-room, where we found a young man
eating bread and cheese. He informed us that he did
not live there, and had only called in to refresh
himself on his way home from church. This room, like
the kitchen, was a noticeably poor one, and, besides
being all that the cottage had to show for a parlor,
it was a sleeping-apartment, having two beds, which
might be curtained off, on occasion. The young man
allowed us liberty (so far as in him lay) to go up
stairs. Up we crept, accordingly; and a few steps
brought us to the top of the staircase, over the
kitchen, where we found the wretchedest little
sleeping-chamber in the world, with a sloping roof
under the thatch, and two beds spread upon the bare
floor. This, most probably, was Burns's chamber;
or, perhaps, it may have been that of his
mother's servant-maid; and, in either case, this
rude floor, at one time or another, must have creaked
beneath the poet's midnight tread. On the
opposite side of the passage was the door of another
attic-chamber, opening which, I saw a considerable
number of cheeses on the floor.

The whole house was pervaded with a frowzy smell,
and also a dunghill odor; and it is not easy to
understand how the atmosphere of such a dwelling can
be any more agreeable or salubrious morally than it
appeared to be physically. No virgin, surely, could
keep a holy awe about her while stowed
higgledy-piggledy with coarse-natured rustics into
this narrowness and filth. Such a habitation is
calculated to make beasts of men and women; and it
indicates a degree of barbarism which I did not
imagine to exist in Scotland, that a tiller of broad
fields, like the farmer ofMauchline, should have his abode
in a pigsty. It is sad to think of anybody--not to say
a poet, but any human being--sleeping, eating,
thinking, praying, and spending all his home-life in
this miserable hovel; but, methinks, I never in the
least knew how to estimate the miracle of Burns's
genius, nor his heroic merit for being no worse man,
until I thus learned the squalid hindrances amid which
he developed himself. Space, a free atmosphere, and
cleanliness have a vast deal to do with the
possibilities of human virtue.

The biographers talk of the farm of Moss Giel as
being damp and unwholesome; but I do not see why,
outside of the cottage-walls, it should possess so
evil a reputation. It occupies a high, broad ridge,
enjoying, surely, whatever benefit can come of a
breezy site, and sloping far downward before any
marshy soil is reached. The high hedge, and the trees
that stand beside the cottage, give it a pleasant
aspect enough to one who does not know the grimy
secrets of the interior; and the summer afternoon was
now so bright that I shall remember the scene with a
great deal of sunshine over it.

Leaving the cottage, we drove through a field,
which the driver told us was that in which Burns
turned up the mouse's nest. It is the enclosure
nearest to the cottage, and seems now to be a pasture,
and a rather remarkably unfertile one. A little
farther on, the ground was whitened with an immense
number of daisies,--daisies, daisies everywhere; and
in answer to my inquiry, the driver said that this was
the field where Burns ran his ploughshare over the
daisy. If so, the soil seems to have been consecrated
to daisies by the song which he bestowed on that first
immortal one. I alighted, and plucked a whole handful
of these"wee,
modest, crimson-tipped flowers," which will be
precious to many friends in our own country as coming
from Burns's farm, and being of the same race and
lineage as that daisy which he turned into an
amaranthine flower while seeming to destroy it.

From Moss Giel we drove through a variety of
pleasant scenes, some of which were familiar to us by
their connection with Burns. We skirted, too, along a
portion of the estate of Auchinleck, which still
belongs to the Boswell family,--the present possessor
being Sir James Boswell,
[2] a grandson of
Johnson's friend, and son of the Sir Alexander
who was killed in a duel. Our driver spoke of Sir
James as a kind, free-hearted man, but addicted to
horse-races and similar pastimes, and a little too
familiar with the wine-cup; so that poor Bozzy's
booziness would appear to have become hereditary in
his ancient line. There is no male heir to the estate
of Auchinleck. The portion of the lands which we saw
is covered with wood and much undermined with
rabbit-warrens; nor, though the territory extends over
a large number of acres, is the income very
considerable.

By and by we came to the spot where Burns saw Miss
Alexander, the Lass of Ballochmyle. It was on a
bridge, which (or, more probably, a bridge that has
succeeded to the old one, and is made of iron) crosses
from bank to bank, high in air over a deep gorge of
the road; so that the young lady may have appeared to
Burns like a creature between earth and sky, and
compounded chiefly of celestial elements. But, in
honest truth, the great charm of a woman, in
Burns's eyes, was always her womanhood, and not
the angelic mixture which other poets find in her.

Our driver pointed out the course taken by the Lass
of Ballochmyle, through the shrubbery, to a rock on
the banks of the Lugar, where it seems to be the
tradition that Burns accosted her. The song implies no
such interview. Lovers, of whatever condition, high or
low, could desire no lovelier scene in which to
breathe their vows: the river flowing over its pebbly
bed, sometimes gleaming into the sunshine, sometimes
hidden deep in verdure, and here and there eddying at
the foot of high and precipitous cliffs. This
beautiful estate of Ballochmyle is still held by the
family of Alexanders, to whom Burns's song has
given renown on cheaper terms than any other set of
people ever attained it. How slight the tenure seems!
A young lady happened to walk out, one summer
afternoon, and crossed the path of a neighboring
farmer, who celebrated the little incident in four or
five warm, rude,--at least, not refined, though rather
ambitious, --and somewhat ploughman-like verses. Burns
has written hundreds of better things; but henceforth,
for centuries, that maiden has free admittance into
the dream-land of Beautiful Women, and she and all her
race are famous. I should like to know the present
head of the family, and ascertain what value, if any,
the members of it put upon the celebrity thus won.

We passed through Catrine, known hereabouts as
"the clean village of Scotland." Certainly,
as regards the point indicated, it has greatly the
advantage of Mauchline, whither we now returned
without seeing anything else worth writing about.

There was a rain-storm during the night, and, in
the morning, the rusty, old, sloping street of
Mauchline was glistening with wet, while frequent
showers came spattering down. The intense heat of
manydays past was
exchanged for a chilly atmosphere, much more suitable
to a stranger's idea of what Scotch temperature
ought to be. We found, after breakfast, that the first
train northward had already gone by, and that we must
wait till nearly two o'clock for the next. I
merely ventured out once, during the forenoon, and
took a brief walk through the village, in which I have
left little to describe. Its chief business appears to
be the manufacture of snuff-boxes. There are perhaps
five or six shops, or more, including those licensed
to sell only tea and tobacco; the best of them have
the characteristics of village stores in the United
States, dealing in a small way with an extensive
variety of articles. I peeped into the open gateway of
the churchyard, and saw that the ground was absolutely
stuffed with dead people, and the surface crowded with
gravestones, both perpendicular and horizontal. All
Burns's old Mauchline acquaintance are doubtless
there, and the Armours among them, except Bonny Jean,
who sleeps by her poet's side. The family of
Armour is now extinct in Mauchline.

Arriving at the railway-station, we found a tall,
elderly, comely gentleman walking to and fro and
waiting for the train. He proved to be a Mr.
Alexander,--it may fairly be presumed the Alexander
of Ballochmyle, a blood relation of the lovely lass.
Wonderful efficacy of a poet's verse, that could shed
a glory from Long Ago on this old gentleman's
white hair! These Alexanders, by the by, are not an
old family on the Ballochmyle estate; the father of
the lass having made a fortune in trade, and
established himself as the first landed proprietor of
his name in these parts. The original family was named
Whitefoord.

Our ride to Ayr presented nothing very
remarkable;and,
indeed, a cloudy and rainy day takes the varnish off
the scenery, and causes a woful diminution in the
beauty and impressiveness of everything we see. Much
of our way lay along a flat, sandy level, in a
southerly direction. We reached Ayr in the midst of
hopeless rain, and drove to the King's Arms
Hotel. In the intervals of showers I took peeps at the
town, which appeared to have many modern or
modern-fronted edifices; although there are likewise
tall, gray, gabled, and quaint-looking houses in the
by-streets, here and there, betokening an ancient
place. The town lies on both sides of the Ayr, which
is here broad and stately, and bordered with dwellings
that look from their windows directly down into the
passing tide.

I crossed the river by a modern and handsome stone
bridge, and recrossed it, at no great distance, by a
venerable structure of four gray arches, which must
have bestridden the stream ever since the early days
of Scottish history. These are the "Two Briggs of
Ayr," whose midnight conversation was overheard
by Burns, while other auditors were aware only of the
rush and rumble of the wintry stream among the arches.
The ancient bridge is steep and narrow, and paved like
a street, and defended by a parapet of red freestone,
except at the two ends, where some mean old shops
allow scanty room for the pathway to creep between.
Nothing else impressed me hereabouts, unless I mention
that, during the rain, the women and girls went about
the streets of Ayr barefooted to save their shoes.

The next morning wore a lowering aspect as if it
felt itself destined to be one of many consecutive
days of storm. After a good Scotch breakfast, however,
of fresh herrings and eggs, we took a fly, and started
ata little past ten
for the banks of the Doon. On our way, at about two
miles from Ayr, we drew up at a roadside cottage, on
which was an inscription to the effect that Robert
Burns was born within its walls. It is now a public
house; and, of course, we alighted and entered its
little sitting-room, which, as we at present see it,
is a neat apartment with the modern improvement of a
ceiling. The walls are much over-scribbled with names
of visitors, and the wooden door of a cupboard in the
wainscot, as well as all the other wood-work of the
room, is cut and carved with initial letters. So,
likewise, are two tables, which, having received a
coat of varnish over the inscriptions, form really
curious and interesting articles of furniture. I have
seldom (though I do not personally adopt this mode of
illustrating my humble name) felt inclined to ridicule
the natural impulse of most people thus to record
themselves at the shrines of poets and heroes.

On a panel, let into the wall in a corner of the
room, is a portrait of Burns, copied from the original
picture by Nasmyth. The floor of this apartment is of
boards, which are probably a recent substitute for the
ordinary flag-stones of a peasant's cottage. There is
but one other room pertaining to the genuine
birthplace of Robert Burns: it is the kitchen, into
which we now went. It has a floor of flag-stones, even
ruder than those of Shakespeare's house,--though,
perhaps, not so strangely cracked and broken as the
latter, over which the hoof of Satan himself might
seem to have been trampling. A new window has been
opened through the wall, towards the road; but on the
opposite side is the little original window, of only
four small panes, through which came the first
daylight that shone upon the Scottish poet. At the
side of the room,opposite the fireplace, is a
recess, containing a bed, which can be hidden by
curtains. In that humble nook, of all places in the
world, Providence was pleased to deposit the germ of
richest human life which mankind then had within its
circumference.

These two rooms, as I have said, make up the whole
sum and substance of Burns's birthplace: for
there were no chambers, nor even attics; and the
thatched roof formed the only ceiling of kitchen and
sitting-room, the height of which was that of the
whole house. The cottage, however, is attached to
another edifice of the same size and description, as
these little habitations often are; and, moreover, a
splendid addition has been made to it, since the
poet's renown began to draw visitors to the
wayside alehouse. The old woman of the house led us
through an entry, and showed a vaulted hall, of no
vast dimensions, to be sure, but marvellously large
and splendid as compared with what might be
anticipated from the outward aspect of the cottage. It
contained a bust of Burns, and was hung round with
pictures and engravings, principally illustrative of
his life and poems. In this part of the house, too,
there is a parlor, fragrant with tobacco-smoke; and,
no doubt, many a noggin of whiskey is here quaffed to
the memory of the bard, who professed to draw so much
inspiration from that potent liquor.

We bought some engravings of Kirk Alloway, the
Bridge of Doon, and the monument, and gave the old
woman a fee besides, and took our leave. A very short
drive farther brought us within sight of the monument,
and to the hotel, situated close by the entrance of
the ornamental grounds within which the former is
enclosed. We rang the bell at the gate of the
enclosure, but were forced to wait a considerable
time;because the
old man, the regular superintendent of the spot, had
gone to assist at the laying of the cornerstone of a
new kirk. He appeared anon, and admitted us, but
immediately hurried away to be present at the
concluding ceremonies, leaving us locked up with
Burns.

The enclosure around the monument is beautifully
laid out as an ornamental garden, and abundantly
provided with rare flowers and shrubbery, all tended
with loving care. The monument stands on an elevated
site, and consists of a massive basement-story,
three-sided, above which rises a light and elegant
Grecian temple,--a mere dome, supported on Corinthian
pillars, and open to all the winds. The edifice is
beautiful in itself; though I know not what peculiar
appropriateness it may have, as the memorial of a
Scottish rural poet.

The door of the basement-story stood open; and,
entering, we saw a bust of Burns in a niche, looking
keener, more refined, but not so warm and whole-souled
as his pictures usually do. I think the likeness
cannot be good. In the centre of the room stood a
glass case, in which were reposited the two volumes of
the little Pocket Bible that Burns gave to Highland
Mary, when they pledged their troth to one another. It
is poorly printed, on coarse paper. A verse of
Scripture, referring to the solemnity and awfulness of
vows, is written within the cover of each volume, in
the poet's own hand; and fastened to one of the
covers is a lock of Highland Mary's golden hair.
This Bible had been carried to America by one of her
relatives, but was sent back to be fitly treasured
here.

There is a staircase within the monument, by which
we ascended to the top, and had a view of both
Briggsof Doon; the
scene of Tam O'Shanter's misadventure being
close at hand. Descending, we wandered through the
enclosed garden, and came to a little building in a
corner, on entering which, we found the two statues of
Tam and Sutor Wat,--ponderous stonework enough, yet
permeated in a remarkable degree with living warmth
and jovial hilarity. From this part of the garden,
too, we again beheld the old Brigg of Doon, over which
Tam galloped in such imminent and awful peril. It is a
beautiful object in the landscape, with one high,
graceful arch, ivy-grown, and shadowed all over and
around with foliage.

When we had waited a good while, the old gardener
came, telling us that he had heard an excellent prayer
at laying the corner-stone of the new kirk. He now
gave us some roses and sweetbrier, and let us out from
his pleasant garden. We immediately hastened to Kirk
Alloway, which is within two or three minutes'
walk of the monument. A few steps ascend from the
roadside, through a gate, into the old graveyard, in
the midst of which stands the kirk. The edifice is
wholly roofless, but the side-walls and gable-ends are
quite entire, though portions of them are evidently
modern restorations. Never was there a plainer little
church, or one with smaller architectural pretensions;
no New England meeting-house has more simplicity in
its very self, though poetry and fun have clambered
and clustered so wildly over Kirk Alloway that it is
difficult to see it as it actually exists. By the by,
I do not understand why Satan and an assembly of
witches should hold their revels within a consecrated
precinct; but the weird scene has so established
itself in the world's imaginative faith that it
must be accepted as an authentic incident, in spite of
rule and reasonto
the contrary. Possibly, some carnal minister, some
priest of pious aspect and hidden infidelity, had
dispelled the consecration of the holy edifice by his
pretence of prayer, and thus made it the resort of
unhappy ghosts and sorcerers and devils.

The interior of the kirk, even now, is applied to
quite as impertinent a purpose as when Satan and the
witches used it as a dancing-hall; for it is divided
in the midst by a wall of stonemasonry, and each
compartment has been converted into a family
burial-place. The name on one of the monuments is
Crawfurd; the other bore no inscription. It is
impossible not to feel that these good people, whoever
they may be, had no business to thrust their prosaic
bones into a spot that belongs to the world, and where
their presence jars with the emotions, be they sad or
gay, which the pilgrim brings thither. They shut us
out from our own precincts, too,--from that
inalienable possession which Burns bestowed in free
gift upon mankind, by taking it from the actual earth
and annexing it to the domain of imagination. And here
these wretched squatters have lain down to their long
sleep, after barring each of the two doorways of the
kirk with an iron grate! May their rest be troubled,
till they rise and let us in!

Kirk Alloway is inconceivably small, considering
how large a space it fills in our imagination before
we see it. I paced its length, outside of the wall,
and found it only seventeen of my paces, and not more
than ten of them in breadth. There seem to have been
but very few windows, all of which, if I rightly
remember, are now blocked up with mason-work of stone.
One mullioned window, tall and narrow, in the eastern
gable, might have been seen by TamO'Shanter, blazing with
devilish light, as he approached along the road from
Ayr; and there is a small and square one, on the side
nearest the road, into which he might have peered, as
he sat on horseback. Indeed, I could easily have
looked through it, standing on the ground, had not the
opening been walled up. There is an odd kind of belfry
at the peak of one of the gables, with the small bell
still hanging in it. And this is all that I remember
of Kirk Alloway, except that the stones of its
material are gray and irregular.

The road from Ayr passes Alloway Kirk, and crosses
the Doon by a modern bridge, without swerving much
from a straight line. To reach the old bridge, it
appears to have made a bend, shortly after passing the
kirk, and then to have turned sharply towards the
river. The new bridge is within a minute's walk of the
monument; and we went thither, and leaned over its
parapet to admire the beautiful Doon, flowing wildly
and sweetly between its deep and wooded banks. I never
saw a lovelier scene; although this might have been
even lovelier if a kindly sun had shone upon it. The
ivy-grown, ancient bridge, with its high arch, through
which we had a picture of the river and the green
banks beyond, was absolutely the most picturesque
object, in a quiet and gentle way, that ever blessed
my eyes. Bonny Doon, with its wooded banks, and the
boughs dipping into the water! The memory of them, at
this moment, affects me like the song of birds, and
Burns crooning some verses, simple and wild, in
accordance with their native melody. It was
impossible to depart without crossing the very bridge
of Tam's adventure; so we went thither, over a
now disused portion of the road, and, standing on
thecentre of the
arch, gathered some ivy-leaves from that sacred spot.
This done, we returned as speedily as might be to Ayr,
whence, taking the rail, we soon beheld Ailsa Craig
rising like a pyramid out of the sea. Drawing nearer
to Glasgow, Ben Lomond hove in sight, with a dome-like
summit, supported by a shoulder on each side. But a
man is better than a mountain; and we had been holding
intercourse, if not with the reality, at least with
the stalwart ghost of one of Earth's memorable
sons, amid the scenes where he lived and sung. We
shall appreciate him better as a poet, hereafter; for
there is no writer whose life, as a man, has so much
to do with his fame, and throws such a necessary light
upon whatever he has produced. Henceforth, there will
be a personal warmth for us in everything that he
wrote; and, like his countrymen, we shall know him in
a kind of personal way, as if we had shaken hands with
him, and felt the thrill of his actual voice.

A LONDON SUBURB.

ONE of our English summers looks, in the
retrospect, as if it had been patched with more
frequent sunshine than the sky of England ordinarily
affords; but I believe that it may be only a moral
effect,--a "light that never was on sea nor
land,"--caused by our having found a particularly
delightful abode in the neighborhood of London. In
order to enjoy it, however, I was compelled to solve
the problem of living in two places at once,--an
impossibility which I so far accomplished as to
vanish, at frequent intervals, out of men's sight
and knowledge on one side of England, and take my
place in a circle of familiar faces on the other, so
quietly that I seemed to have been there all along. It
was the easier to get accustomed to our new residence,
because it was not only rich in all the material
properties of a home, but had also the home-like
atmosphere, the household element, which is of too
intangible a character to be let even with the most
thoroughly furnished lodging-house. A friend had given
us his suburban residence, with all its conveniences,
elegances, and snuggeries,--its drawing-rooms and
library, still warm and bright with the recollection
of the genial presences that we had known there,--its
closets, chambers, kitchen, and even its wine-cellar,
if we could have availed ourselves of so dear and
delicate a trust,--its lawn and cosey garden-nooks,
and whatever else makes up the multitudinous idea of
an English home,--he had transferred it allto us, pilgrims and
dusty wayfarers, that we might rest and take our ease
during his summer's absence on the Continent. We
had long been dwelling in tents, as it were, and
morally shivering by hearths which, heap the
bituminous coal upon them as we might, no blaze could
render cheerful. I remember, to this day, the dreary
feeling with which I sat by our first English
fireside, and watched the chill and rainy twilight of
an autumn day darkening down upon the garden; while
the portrait of the preceding occupant of the house
(evidently a most unamiable personage in his lifetime)
scowled inhospitably from above the mantel-piece, as
if indignant that an American should try to make
himself at home there. Possibly it may appease his
sulky shade to know that I quitted his abode as much a
stranger as I entered it. But now, at last, we were in
a genuine British home, where refined and warm-hearted
people had just been living their daily life, and had
left us a summer's inheritance of slowly ripened
days, such as a stranger's hasty opportunities so
seldom permit him to enjoy.

Within so trifling a distance of the central spot
of all the world (which, as Americans have at present
no centre of their own, we may allow to be somewhere
in the vicinity, we will say, of St. Paul's
Cathedral), it might have seemed natural that I should
be tossed about by the turbulence of the vast London
whirlpool. But I had drifted into a still eddy, where
conflicting movements made a repose, and, wearied with
a good deal of uncongenial activity, I found the quiet
of my temporary haven more attractive than anything
that the great town could offer. I already knew London
well; that is to say, I had long ago satisfied (so far
as it was capable of satisfaction) that mysteriousyearning--the
magnetism of millions of hearts operating upon
one--which impels every man's individuality to
mingle itself with the immensest mass of human life
within his scope. Day after day, at an earlier period,
I had trodden the thronged thoroughfares, the broad,
lonely squares, the lanes, alleys, and strange
labyrinthine courts, the parks, the gardens and
enclosures of ancient studious societies, so retired
and silent amid the city uproar, the markets, the
foggy streets along the river-side, the bridges,--I
had sought all parts of the metropolis, in short, with
an unweariable and indiscriminating curiosity; until
few of the native inhabitants, I fancy, had turned so
many of its corners as myself. These aimless
wanderings (in which my prime purpose and achievement
were to lose my way, and so to find it the more
surely) had brought me, at one time or another, to the
sight and actual presence of almost all the objects
and renowned localities that I had read about, and
which had made London the dream-city of my youth. I
had found it better than my dream; for there is
nothing else in life comparable (in that species of
enjoyment, I mean) to the thick, heavy, oppressive,
sombre delight which an American is sensible of,
hardly knowing whether to call it a pleasure or a
pain, in the atmosphere of London. The result was,
that I acquired a home-feeling there, as nowhere else
in the world,--though afterwards I came to have a
somewhat similar sentiment in regard to Rome; and as
long as either of those two great cities shall exist,
the cities of the Past and of the Present, a
man's native soil may crumble beneath his feet
without leaving him altogether homeless upon earth.

Thus, having once fully yielded to its influence,
Iwas in a manner
free of the city, and could approach or keep away from
it as I pleased. Hence it happened, that, living
within a quarter of an hour's rush of the London
Bridge Terminus, I was oftener tempted to spend a
whole summer-day in our garden than to seek anything
new or old, wonderful or commonplace, beyond its
precincts. It was a delightful garden, of no great
extent, but comprising a good many facilities for
repose and enjoyment, such as arbors and garden-seats,
shrubbery, flower-beds, rose-bushes in a profusion of
bloom, pinks, poppies, geraniums, sweet-peas, and a
variety of other scarlet, yellow, blue, and purple
blossoms, which I did not trouble myself to recognize
individually, yet had always a vague sense of their
beauty about me. The dim sky of England has a most
happy effect on the coloring of flowers, blending
richness with delicacy in the same texture; but in
this garden, as everywhere else, the exuberance of
English verdure had a greater charm than any tropical
splendor or diversity of hue. The hunger for natural
beauty might be satisfied with grass and green leaves
forever. Conscious of the triumph of England in this
respect, and loyally anxious for the credit of my own
country, it gratified me to observe what trouble and
pains the English gardeners are fain to throw away in
producing a few sour plums and abortive pears and
apples,--as, for example, in this very garden, where a
row of unhappy trees were spread out perfectly flat
against a brick wall, looking as if impaled alive, or
crucified, with a cruel and unattainable purpose of
compelling them to produce rich fruit by torture. For
my part, I never ate an English fruit, raised in the
open air, that could compare in flavor with a Yankee
turnip.

The garden included that prime feature of English
domestic scenery, a lawn. It had been levelled,
carefully shorn, and converted into a bowling-green,
on which we sometimes essayed to practise the
time-honored game of bowls, most unskilfully, yet not
without a perception that it involves a very pleasant
mixture of exercise and ease, as is the case with most
of the old English pastimes. Our little domain was
shut in by the house on one side, and in other
directions by a hedge-fence and a brick wall, which
last was concealed or softened by shrubbery and the
impaled fruit-trees already mentioned. Over all the
outer region, beyond our immediate precincts, there
was an abundance of foliage, tossed aloft from the
near or distant trees with which that agreeble suburb
is adorned. The effect was wonderfully sylvan and
rural, insomuch, that we might have fancied ourselves
in the depths of a wooded seclusion; only that, at
brief intervals, we could hear the galloping sweep of
a railway-train passing within a quarter of a mile,
and its discordant screech, moderated by a little
farther distance, as it reached the Blackheath
Station. That harsh, rough sound, seeking me out so
inevitably, was the voice of the great world summoning
me forth. I know not whether I was the more pained or
pleased to be thus constantly put in mind of the
neighborhood of London; for, on the one hand, my
conscience stung me a little for reading a book, or
playing with children in the grass, when there were so
many better things for an enlightened traveller to
do,--while, at the same time, it gave a deeper delight
to my luxurious idleness, to contrast it with the
turmoil which I escaped. On the whole, however, I do
not repent of a single wasted hour, and only wish that
I could have spenttwice as many in the same way; for
the impression on my memory is, that I was as happy in
that hospitable garden as the English summer-day was
long.

One chief condition of my enjoyment was the
weather. Italy has nothing like it, nor America.
There never was such weather except in England, where,
in requital of a vast amount of horrible east-wind
between February and June, and a brown October and
black November, and a wet, chill, sunless winter,
there are a few weeks of incomparable summer,
scattered through July and August, and the earlier
portion of September, small in quantity, but exquisite
enough to atone for the whole year's
atmospherical delinquencies. After all, the prevalent
sombreness may have brought out those sunny intervals
in such high relief, that I see them, in my
recollection, brighter than they really were: a little
light makes a glory for people who live habitually in
a gray gloom. The English, however, do not seem to
know how enjoyable the momentary gleams of their
summer are; they call it broiling weather, and hurry
to the seaside with red, perspiring faces, in a state
of combustion and deliquescence; and I have observed
that even their cattle have similar susceptibilities,
seeking the deepest shade, or standing midleg deep in
pools and streams to cool themselves, at temperatures
which our own cows would deem little more than barely
comfortable. To myself, after the summer heats of my
native land had somewhat effervesced out of my blood
and memory, it was the weather of Paradise itself. It
might be a little too warm; but it was that modest and
inestimable superabundance which constitutes a bounty
of Providence, instead of just a niggardly enough.
During my first year in England, residingin perhaps the most
ungenial part of the kingdom, I could never be quite
comfortable without a fire on the hearth; in the
second twelvemonth, beginning to get acclimatized, I
became sensible of an austere friendliness, shy, but
sometimes almost tender, in the veiled, shadowy,
seldom smiling summer; and in the succeeding
years,--whether that I had renewed my fibre with
English beef and replenished my blood with English
ale, or whatever were the cause,--I grew content with
winter and especially in love with summer, desiring
little more for happiness than merely to breathe and
bask. At the midsummer which we are now speaking of, I
must needs confess that the noon-tide sun came down
more fervently than I found altogether tolerable; so
that I was fain to shift my position with the shadow
of the shrubbery, making myself the movable index of a
sundial that reckoned up the hours of an almost
interminable day.

For each day seemed endless, though never
wearisome. As far as your actual experience is
concerned, the English summer-day has positively no
beginning and no end. When you awake, at any
reasonable hour, the sun is already shining through
the curtains; you live through unnumbered hours of
Sabbath quietude, with a calm variety of incident
softly etched upon their tranquil lapse; and at length
you become conscious that it is bedtime again, while
there is still enough daylight in the sky to make the
pages of your book distinctly legible. Night, if there
be any such season, hangs down a transparent veil
through which the by-gone day beholds its successor;
or, if not quite true of the latitude of London, it
may be soberly affirmed of the more northern parts of
the island, that To-morrow is born before its
Yesterday is dead. Theyexist together in the golden
twilight, where the decrepit old day dimly discerns
the face of the ominous infant; and you, though a mere
mortal, may simultaneously touch them both with one
finger of recollection and another of prophecy. I
cared not how long the day might be, nor how many of
them. I had earned this repose by a long course of
irksome toil and perturbation, and could have been
content never to stray out of the limits of that
suburban villa and its garden. If I lacked anything
beyond, it would have satisfied me well enough to
dream about it, instead of struggling for its actual
possession. At least, this was the feeling of the
moment; although the transitory, flitting, and
irresponsible character of my life there was perhaps
the most enjoyable element of all, as allowing me much
of the comfort of house and home, without any sense of
their weight upon my back. The nomadic life has great
advantages, if we can find tents ready pitched for us
at every stage.

So much for the interior of our abode,--a spot of
deepest quiet, within reach of the intensest activity.
But, even when we stepped beyond our own gate, we were
not shocked with any immediate presence of the great
world. We were dwelling in one of those oases that
have grown up (in comparatively recent years, I
believe) on the wide waste of Blackheath, which
otherwise offers a vast extent of unoccupied ground in
singular proximity to the metropolis. As a general
thing, the proprietorship of the soil seems to exist
in everybody and nobody; but exclusive rights have
been obtained, here and there, chiefly by men whose
daily concerns link them with London, so that you find
their villas or boxes standing along village streets
which have often more of an American aspect than the
elderEnglish
settlements. The scene is semi-rural. Ornamental trees
overshadow the sidewalks, and grassy margins border
the wheel-tracks. The houses, to be sure, have certain
points of difference from those of an American
village, bearing tokens of architectural design,
though seldom of individual taste; and, as far as
possible, they stand aloof from the street, and
separated each from its neighbor by hedge or fence, in
accordance with the careful exclusiveness of the
English character, which impels the occupant,
moreover, to cover the front of his dwelling with as
much concealment of shrubbery as his limits will
allow. Through the interstices, you catch glimpses of
well-kept lawns, generally ornamented with flowers,
and with what the English call rock-work, being heaps
of ivy-grown stones and fossils, designed for romantic
effect in a small way. Two or three of such village
streets as are here described take a collective
name,--as, for instance, Blackheath Park,--and
constitute a kind of community of residents, with
gateways, kept by a policeman, and a semi-privacy,
stepping beyond which, you find yourself on the breezy
heath.

On this great, bare, dreary common I often went
astray, as I afterwards did on the Campagna of Rome,
and drew the air (tainted with London smoke though it
might be) into my lungs by deep inspirations, with a
strange and unexpected sense of desert freedom. The
misty atmosphere helps you to fancy a remoteness that
perhaps does not quite exist. During the little time
that it lasts, the solitude is as impressive as that
of a Western prairie or forest; but soon the railway
shriek, a mile or two away, insists upon informing you
of your whereabout; or you recognize in the distance
some landmark that you may have known,--aninsulated villa,
perhaps, with its garden-wall around it, or the
rudimental street of a new settlement which is
sprouting on this otherwise barren soil. Half a
century ago, the most frequent token of man's
beneficent contiguity might have been a gibbet, and
the creak, like a tavern sign, of a murderer swinging
to and fro in irons. Blackheath, with its highwaymen
and foot-pads, was dangerous in those days; and even
now, for aught I know, the Western prairie may still
compare favorably with it as a safe region to go
astray in. When I was acquainted with Blackheath, the
ingenious device of garroting had recently come into
fashion; and I can remember, while crossing those
waste places at midnight, and hearing footsteps behind
me, to have been sensibly encouraged by also hearing,
not far off, the clinking hoof-tramp of one of the
horse-patrols who do regular duty there. About sunset,
or a little later, was the time when the broad and
somewhat desolate peculiarity of the heath seemed to
me to put on its utmost impressiveness. At that hour,
finding myself on elevated ground, I once had a view
of immense London, four or five miles off, with the
vast Dome in the midst, and the towers of the two
Houses of Parliament rising up into the smoky canopy,
the thinner substance of which obscured a mass of
things, and hovered about the objects that were most
distinctly visible,--a glorious and sombre picture,
dusky, awful, but irresistibly attractive, like a
young man's dream of the great world, foretelling
at that distance a grandeur never to be fully
realized.

While I lived in that neighborhood, the tents of
two or three sets of cricket-players were constantly
pitched on Blackheath, and matches were going forward
that seemed to involve the honor and credit ofcommunities or
counties, exciting an interest in everybody but
myself, who cared not what part of England might
glorify itself at the expense of another. It is
necessary to be born an Englishman, I believe, in
order to enjoy this great national game; at any rate,
as a spectacle for an outside observer, I found it
lazy, lingering, tedious, and utterly devoid of
pictorial effects. Choice of other amusements was at
hand. Butts for archery were established, and bows and
arrows were to be let, at so many shots for a
penny,--there being abundance of space for a farther
flight-shot than any modern archer can lend to his
shaft. Then there was an absurd game of throwing a
stick at crockery-ware, which I have witnessed a
hundred times, and personally engaged in once or
twice, without ever having the satisfaction to see a
bit of broken crockery. In other spots you found
donkeys for children to ride, and ponies of a very
meek and patient spirit, on which the Cockney
pleasure-seekers of both sexes rode races and made
wonderful displays of horsemanship. By way of
refreshment there was gingerbread (but, as a true
patriot, I must pronounce it greatly inferior to our
native dainty), and ginger-beer, and probably stancher
liquor among the booth-keeper's hidden stores.
The frequent railway-trains, as well as the numerous
steamers to Greenwich, have made the vacant portions
of Blackheath a play-ground and breathing-place for
the Londoners, readily and very cheaply accessible; so
that, in view of this broader use and enjoyment, I a
little grudged the tracts that have been filched away,
so to speak, and individualized by thriving citizens.
One sort of visitors especially interested me: they
were schools of little boys or girls, under the
guardianship of their instructors,--charity schools,
asI often surmised
from their aspect, collected among dark alleys and
squalid courts; and hither they were brought to spend
a summer afternoon, these pale little progeny of the
sunless nooks of London, who had never known that the
sky was any broader than that narrow and vapory strip
above their native lane. I fancied that they took but
a doubtful pleasure, being half affrighted at the
wide, empty space overhead and round about them,
finding the air too little medicated with smoke, soot,
and graveyard exhalations, to be breathed with
comfort, and feeling shelterless and lost because
grimy London, their slatternly and disreputable
mother, had suffered them to stray out of her arms.

Passing among these holiday people, we come to one
of the gateways of Greenwich Park, opening through an
old brick wall. It admits us from the bare heath into
a scene of antique cultivation and woodland ornament,
traversed in all directions by avenues of trees, many
of which bear tokens of a venerable age. These broad
and well-kept pathways rise and decline over the
elevations, and along the bases of gentle hills, which
diversify the whole surface of the Park. The loftiest
and most abrupt of them (though but of very moderate
height) is one of the earth's noted summits, and may
hold up its head with Mont Blanc and Chimborazo, as
being the site of Greenwich Observatory, where, if all
nations will consent to say so, the longitude of our
great globe begins. I used to regulate my watch by the
broad dial-plate against the Observatory wall, and
felt it pleasant to he standing at the very centre of
Time and Space.

There are lovelier parks than this in the
neighborhood of London, richer scenes of greensward
andcultivated
trees; and Kensington, especially, in a summer
afternoon, has seemed to me as delightful as any place
can or ought to be, in a world which, some time or
other, we must quit. But Greenwich, too, is
beautiful,--a spot where the art of man has conspired
with Nature, as if he and the great mother had taken
counsel together how to make a pleasant scene, and the
longest liver of the two had faithfully carried out
their mutual design. It has, likewise, an additional
charm of its own, because, to all appearance, it is
the people's property and play-ground in a much
more genuine way than the aristocratic resorts in
closer vicinity to the metropolis. It affords one of
the instances in which the monarch's property is
actually the people's, and shows how much more
natural is their relation to the sovereign than to the
nobility, which pretends to hold the intervening space
between the two: for a nobleman makes a paradise only
for himself, and fills it with his own pomp and pride;
whereas the people are sooner or later the legitimate
inheritors of whatever beauty kings and queens create,
as now of Greenwich Park. On Sundays, when the sun
shone, and even on those grim and sombre days when, if
it do not actually rain, the English persist in
calling it fine weather, it was too good to see how
sturdily the plebeians trod under their own oaks, and
what fulness of simple enjoyment they evidently found
there. They were the people,--not the
populace,--specimens of a class whose Sunday clothes
are a distinct kind of garb from their week-day ones;
and this, in England, implies wholesome habits of
life, daily thrift, and a rank above the lowest. I
longed to be acquainted with them, in order to
investigate what manner of folks they were, what sort
of households theykept, their politics, their
religion, their tastes, and whether they were as
narrow-minded as their betters. There can be very
little doubt of it: an Englishman is English, in
whatever rank of life, though no more intensely so, I
should imagine, as an artisan or petty shopkeeper,
than as a member of Parliament.

The English character, as I conceive it, is by no
means a very lofty one; they seem to have a great deal
of earth and grimy dust clinging about them, as was
probably the case with the stalwart and quarrelsome
people who sprouted up out of the soil, after Cadmus
had sown the dragon's teeth. And yet, though the
individual Englishman is sometimes preternaturally
disagreeable, an observer standing aloof has a sense
of natural kindness towards them in the lump. They
adhere closer to the original simplicity in which
mankind was created than we ourselves do; they love,
quarrel, laugh, cry, and turn their actual selves
inside out with greater freedom than any class of
Americans would consider decorous. It was often so
with these holiday folks in Greenwich Park; and,
ridiculous as it may sound, I fancy myself to have
caught very satisfactory glimpses of Arcadian life
among the Cockneys there, hardly beyond the scope of
Bow-Bells, picnicking in the grass, uncouthly
gambolling on the broad slopes, or straying in motley
groups or by single pairs of lovemaking youths and
maidens, along the sun-streaked avenues. Even the
omnipresent policemen or park-keepers could not
disturb the beatific impression on my mind. One
feature, at all events, of the Golden Age was to be
seen in the herds of deer that encountered you in the
somewhat remoter recesses of the Park, and were
readily prevailed upon to nibble a bit of bread out of
your hand. But, though nowrong had ever been done them, and
no horn had sounded nor hound bayed at the heels of
themselves or their antlered progenitors for centuries
past, there was still an apprehensiveness lingering in
their hearts; so that a slight movement of the hand or
a step too near would send a whole squadron of them
scampering away, just as a breath scatters the winged
seeds of a dandelion.

The aspect of Greenwich Park, with all those festal
people wandering through it, resembled that of the
Borghese Gardens under the walls of Rome, on a Sunday
or Saint's day; but, I am not ashamed to say, it a
little disturbed whatever grimly ghost of Puritanic
strictness might be lingering in the sombre depths of
a New England heart, among severe and sunless
remembrances of the Sabbaths of childhood, and pangs
of remorse for ill-gotten lessons in the catechism,
and for erratic fantasies or hardly suppressed
laughter in the middle of long sermons. Occasionally,
I tried to take the long-hoarded sting out of these
compunctious smarts by attending divine service in the
open air. On a cart outside of the Park-wall (and, if
I mistake not, at two or three corners and secluded
spots within the Park itself) a Methodist preacher
uplifts his voice and speedily gathers a congregation,
his zeal for whose religious welfare impels the good
man to such earnest vociferation and toilsome gesture
that his perspiring face is quickly in a stew. His
inward flame conspires with the too fervid sun, and
makes a positive martyr of him, even in the very
exercise of his pious labor insomuch that he purchases
every atom of spiritual increment to his hearers by
loss of his own corporeal solidity, and, should his
discourse last long enough, must finally exhale before
their eyes. If I smile athim, be it understood, it is not
in scorn; he performs his sacred office more
acceptably than many a prelate. These wayside
services attract numbers who would not otherwise
listen to prayer, sermon, or hymn, from one
year's end to another, and who, for that very
reason, are the auditors most likely to be moved by
the preacher's eloquence. Yonder Greenwich
pensioner, too,--in his costume of three-cornered hat,
and old-fashioned, brass-buttoned blue coat with ample
skirts, which makes him look like a contemporary of
Admiral Benbow,--that tough old mariner may hear a
word or two which will go nearer his heart than
anything that the chaplain of the Hospital can be
expected to deliver. I always noticed, moreover, that
a considerable proportion of the audience were
soldiers, who came hither with a day's leave from
Woolwich,--hardy veterans in aspect, some of whom wore
as many as four or five medals, Crimean or East
Indian, on the breasts of their scarlet coats. The
miscellaneous congregation listen with every
appearance of heartfelt interest; and, for my own
part, I must frankly acknowledge that I never found it
possible to give five minutes' attention to any
other English preaching: so cold and commonplace are
the homilies that pass for such, under the aged roofs
of churches. And as for cathedrals, the sermon is an
exceedingly diminutive and unimportant part of the
religious services, --if, indeed, it be considered a
part,--among the pompous ceremonies, the intonations,
and the resounding and lofty-voiced strains of the
choristers. The magnificence of the setting quite
dazzles out what we Puritans look upon as the jewel of
the whole affair; for I presume that it was our
forefathers, the Dissenters in England and America,
who gave the sermon its present prominence in the
Sabbath exercises.

The Methodists are probably the first and only
Englishmen who have worshipped in the open air since
the ancient Britons listened to the preaching of the
Druids; and it reminded me of that old priesthood, to
see certain memorials of their dusky epoch --not
religious, however, but warlike--in the neighborhood
of the spot where the Methodist was holding forth.
These were some ancient barrows, beneath or within
which are supposed to lie buried the slain of a
forgotten or doubtfully remembered battle, fought on
the site of Greenwich Park as long ago as two or three
centuries after the birth of Christ. Whatever may once
have been their height and magnitude, they have now
scarcely more prominence in the actual scene than the
battle of which they are the sole monuments retains in
history,--being only a few mounds side by side,
elevated a little above the surface of the ground, ten
or twelve feet in diameter, with a shallow depression
in their summits. When one of them was opened, not
long since, no bones, nor armor, nor weapons were
discovered, nothing but some small jewels, and a tuft
of hair,--perhaps from the head of a valiant general,
who, dying on the field of his victory, bequeathed
this lock, together with his indestructible fame, to
after ages. The hair and jewels are probably in the
British Museum, where the potsherds and rubbish of
innumerable generations make the visitor wish that
each passing century could carry off all its fragments
and relics along with it, instead of adding them to
the continually accumulating burden which human
knowledge is compelled to lug upon its back. As for
the fame, I know not what has become of it.

After traversing the Park, we come into the
neighborhood of Greenwich Hospital, and will pass
throughone of its
spacious gateways for the sake of glancing at an
establishment which does more honor to the heart of
England than anything else that I am acquainted with,
of a public nature. It is very seldom that we can be
sensible of anything like kindliness in the acts or
relations of such an artificial thing as a National
Government. Our own government, I should conceive, is
too much an abstraction ever to feel any sympathy for
its maimed sailors and soldiers, though it will
doubtless do them a severe kind of justice, as
chilling as the touch of steel. But it seemed to me
that the Greenwich pensioners are the petted children
of the nation, and that the government is their
dry-nurse, and that the old men themselves have a
child-like consciousness of their position. Very
likely, a better sort of life might have been
arranged, and a wiser care bestowed on them; but, such
as it is, it enables them to spend a sluggish,
careless, comfortable old age, grumbling, growling,
gruff, as if all the foul weather of their past years
were pent up within them, yet not much more
discontented than such weather-beaten and
battle-battered fragments of human kind must
inevitably be. Their home, in its outward form, is on
a very magnificent plan. Its germ was a royal palace,
the full expansion of which has resulted in a series
of edifices externally more beautiful than any English
palace that I have seen, consisting of several
quadrangles of stately architecture, united by
colonnades and gravel-walks, and enclosing grassy
squares, with statues in the centre, the whole
extending along the Thames. It is built of marble, or
very light-colored stone, in the classic style, with
pillars and porticos, which (to my own taste, and, I
fancy, to that of the old sailors) produce but a cold
and shivery effectin the English climate. Had I been
the architect, I would have studied the characters,
habits, and predilections of nautical people in
Wapping, Rotherhithe, and the neighborhood of the
Tower (places which I visited in affectionate
remembrance of Captain Lemuel Gulliver, and other
actual or mythological navigators), and would have
built the hospital in a kind of ethereal similitude to
the narrow, dark, ugly, and inconvenient, but snug and
cosey homeliness of the sailor boarding-houses there.
There can be no question that all the above
attributes, or enough of them to satisfy an old
sailor's heart, might be reconciled with
architectural beauty and the wholesome contrivances of
modern dwellings, and thus a novel and genuine style
of building be given to the world.

But their countrymen meant kindly by the old
fellows in assigning them the ancient royal site where
Elizabeth held her court and Charles II. began to
build his palace. So far as the locality went, it was
treating them like so many kings; and, with a discreet
abundance of grog, beer, and tobacco, there was
perhaps little more to be accomplished in behalf of
men whose whole previous lives have tended to unfit
them for old age. Their chief discomfort is probably
for lack of something to do or think about. But,
judging by the few whom I saw, a listless habit seems
to have crept over them, a dim dreaminess of mood, in
which they sit between asleep and awake, and find the
long day wearing towards bedtime without its having
made any distinct record of itself upon their
consciousness. Sitting on stone benches in the
sunshine, they subside into slumber, or nearly so, and
start at the approach of footsteps echoing under the
colonnades, ashamed to be caught napping, and rousing
themselves in a hurry,as formerly on the midnight watch
at sea. In their brightest moments, they gather in
groups and bore one another with endless sea-yarns
about their voyages under famous admirals, and about
gale and calm, battle and chase, and all that class of
incident that has its sphere on the deck and in the
hollow interior of a ship, where their world has
exclusively been. For other pastime, they quarrel
among themselves, comrade with comrade, and perhaps
shake paralytic fists in furrowed faces. If inclined
for a little exercise, they can bestir their wooden
legs on the long esplanade that borders by the Thames,
criticising the rig of passing ships, and firing off
volleys of malediction at the steamers, which have
made the sea another element than that they used to be
acquainted with. All this is but cold comfort for the
evening of life, yet may compare rather favorably with
the preceding portions of it, comprising little save
imprisonment on ship-board, in the course of which
they have been tossed all about the world and caught
hardly a glimpse of it, forgetting what grass and
trees are, and never finding out what woman is, though
they may have encountered a painted spectre which they
took for her. A country owes much to human beings
whose bodies she has worn out and whose immortal part
she has left undeveloped or debased, as we find them
here; and having wasted an idle paragraph upon them,
let me now suggest that old men have a kind of
susceptibility to moral impressions, and even (up to
an advanced period) a receptivity of truth, which
often appears to come to them after the active time of
life is past. The Greenwich pensioners might prove
better subjects for true education now than in their
school-boy days; but then whereis the Normal School that could
educate instructors for such a class?

There is a beautiful chapel for the pensioners, in
the classic style, over the altar of which hangs a
picture by West. I never could look at it long enough
to make out its design; for this artist (though it
pains me to say it of so respectable a countryman) had
a gift of frigidity, a knack of grinding ice into his
paint, a power of stupefying the spectator's
perceptions and quelling his sympathy, beyond any
other limner that ever handled a brush. In spite of
many pangs of conscience, I seize this opportunity to
wreak a lifelong abhorrence upon the poor, blameless
man, for the sake of that dreary picture of Lear, an
explosion of frosty fury, that used to be a bugbear to
me in the Athenæum Exhibition. Would fire burn
it, I wonder?

The principal thing that they have to show you, at
Greenwich Hospital, is the Painted Hall. It is a
splendid and spacious room, at least a hundred feet
long and half as high, with a ceiling painted in
fresco by Sir James Thornhill. As a work of art, I
presume, this frescoed canopy has little merit, though
it produces an exceedingly rich effect by its
brilliant coloring and as a specimen of magnificent
upholstery. The walls of the grand apartment are
entirely covered with pictures, many of them
representing battles and other naval incidents that
were once fresher in the world's memory than now,
but chiefly portraits of old admirals, comprising the
whole line of heroes who have trod the quarter-decks
of British ships for more than two hundred years back.
Next to a tomb in Westminster Abbey, which was
Nelson's most elevated object of ambition, it would
seem to be the highest meed of a naval warrior to have
his portrait hung up in the PaintedHall; but, by dint of victory upon
victory, these illustrious personages have grown to be
a mob, and by no means a very interesting one, so far
as regards the character of the faces here depicted.
They are generally commonplace, and often singularly
stolid; and I have observed (both in the Painted Hall
and elsewhere, and not only in portraits, but in the
actual presence of such renowned people as I have
caught glimpses of) that the countenances of heroes
are not nearly so impressive as those of
statesmen,--except, of course, in the rare instances
where warlike ability has been but the one-sided
manifestation of a profound genius for managing the
world's affairs. Nine tenths of these
distinguished admirals, for instance, if their faces
tell truth, must needs have been blockheads, and might
have served better, one would imagine, as wooden
figure-heads for their own ships than to direct any
difficult and intricate scheme of action from the
quarter-deck. It is doubtful whether the same kind of
men will hereafter meet with a similar degree of
success; for they were victorious chiefly through the
old English hardihood, exercised in a field of which
modern science had not yet got possession. Rough valor
has lost something of its value since their days, and
must continue to sink lower and lower in the
comparative estimate of warlike qualities. In the next
naval war, as between England and France, I would bet,
methinks, upon the Frenchman's head.

It is remarkable, however, that the great naval
hero of England--the greatest, therefore, in the
world, and of all time--had none of the stolid
characteristics that belong to his class, and cannot
fairly be accepted as their representative man.
Foremost in the roughest of professions, he was as
delicately organized as awoman, and as painfully sensitive
as a poet. More than any other Englishman he won the
love and admiration of his country, but won them
through the efficacy of qualities that are not
English, or, at all events, were intensified in his
case and made poignant and powerful by something
morbid in the man, which put him otherwise at
cross-purposes with life. He was a man of genius; and
genius in an Englishman (not to cite the good old
simile of a pearl in the oyster) is usually a symptom
of a lack of balance in the general making-up of the
character; as we may satisfy ourselves by running over
the list of their poets, for example, and observing
how many of them have been sickly or deformed, and how
often their lives have been darkened by insanity. An
ordinary Englishman is the healthiest and wholesomest
of human beings; an extraordinary one is almost
always, in one way or another, a sick man. It was so
with Lord Nelson. The wonderful contrast or relation
between his personal qualities, the position which he
held, and the life that he lived, makes him as
interesting a personage as all history has to show;
and it is a pity that Southey's biography--so
good in its superficial way, and yet so inadequate as
regards any real delineation of the man--should have
taken the subject out of the hands of some writer
endowed with more delicate appreciation and deeper
insight than that genuine Englishman possessed. But
Southey accomplished his own purpose, which,
apparently, was to present his hero as a pattern for
England's young midshipmen.

But the English capacity for hero-worship is full
to the brim with what they are able to comprehend of
Lord Nelson's character. Adjoining the Painted
Hall is a smaller room, the walls of which are
completelyand
exclusively adorned with pictures of the great
Admiral's exploits. We see the frail, ardent man in
all the most noted events of his career, from his
encounter with a Polar Bear to his death at Trafalgar,
quivering here and there about the room like a blue,
lambent flame. No Briton ever enters that apartment
without feeling the beef and ale of his composition
stirred to its depths, and finding himself changed
into a hero for the nonce, however stolid his brain,
however tough his heart, however unexcitable his
ordinary mood. To confess the truth, I myself, though
belonging to another parish, have been deeply sensible
to the sublime recollections there aroused,
acknowledging that Nelson expressed his life in a kind
of symbolic poetry which I had as much right to
understand as these burly islanders. Cool and critical
observer as I sought to be, I enjoyed their burst of
honest indignation when a visitor (not an American, I
am glad to say) thrust his walking-stick almost into
Nelson's face, in one of the pictures, by way of
pointing a remark; and the by-standers immediately
glowed like so many hot coals, and would probably have
consumed the offender in their wrath, had he not
effected his retreat. But the most sacred objects of
all are two of Nelson's coats, under separate
glass cases. One is that which he wore at the Battle
of the Nile, and it is now sadly injured by moths,
which will quite destroy it in a few years, unless its
guardians preserve it as we do Washington's
military suit by occasionally baking it in an oven.
The other is the coat in which he received his
death-wound at Trafalgar. On its breast are sewed
three or four stars and orders of knighthood, now much
dimmed by time and damp, but which glittered brightly
enough on the battle-day to draw the fatal aim of a
Frenchmarksman.
The bullet-hole is visible on the shoulder, as well as
a part of the golden tassels of an epaulet, the rest
of which was shot away. Over the coat is laid a white
waistcoat, with a great blood-stain on it, out of
which all the redness has utterly faded, leaving it of
a dingy yellow hue, in the threescore years since that
blood gushed out. Yet it was once the reddest blood in
England,--Nelson's blood!

The hospital stands close adjacent to the town of
Greenwich, which will always retain a kind of festal
aspect in my memory, in consequence of my having first
become acquainted with it on Easter Monday. Till
a few years ago, the first three days of Easter
were a carnival season in this old town, during which
the idle and disreputable part of London poured itself
into the streets like an inundation of the Thames,--as
unclean as that turbid mixture of the offscourings of
the vast city, and overflowing with its grimy
pollution whatever rural innocence, if any, might be
found in the suburban neighborhood. This festivity was
called Greenwich Fair, the final one of which, in an
immemorial succession, it was my fortune to behold.

If I had bethought myself of going through the fair
with a note-book and pencil, jotting down all the
prominent objects, I doubt not that the result might
have been a sketch of English life quite as
characteristic and worthy of historical preservation
as an account of the Roman Carnival. Having neglected
to do so, I remember little more than a confusion of
unwashed and shabbily dressed people, intermixed with
some smarter figures, but, on the whole, presenting a
mobbish appearance such as we never see in our own
country. It taught me to understand why Shakespeare,
in speaking of a crowd, so often alludes to itsattribute of evil
odor. The common people of England, I am afraid, have
no daily familiarity with even so necessary a thing as
a wash-bowl, not to mention a bathing-tub. And,
furthermore, it is one mighty difference between them
and us, that every man and woman on our side of the
water has a working-day suit and a holiday suit, and
is occasionally as fresh as a rose, whereas, in the
good old country, the griminess of his labor or
squalid habits clings forever to the individual, and
gets to be a part of his personal substance. These are
broad facts, involving great corollaries and
dependencies. There are really, if you stop to think
about it, few sadder spectacles in the world than a
ragged coat, or a soiled and shabby gown, at a
festival.

This unfragrant crowd was exceedingly dense, being
welded together, as it were, in the street through
which we strove to make our way. On either side were
oyster-stands, stalls of oranges (a very prevalent
fruit in England, where they give the withered ones a
guise of freshness by boiling them), and booths
covered with old sail-cloth, in which the commodity
that most attracted the eye was gilt gingerbread. It
was so completely enveloped in Dutch gilding that I
did not at first recognize an old acquaintance, but
wondered what those golden crowns and images could be.
There were likewise drums and other toys for small
children, and a variety of showy and worthless
articles for children of a larger growth; though it
perplexed me to imagine who, in such a mob, could have
the innocent taste to desire playthings, or the money
to pay for them. Not that I have a right to accuse the
mob, on my own knowledge, of being any less innocent
than a set of cleaner and better dressed people might
havebeen; for,
though one of them stole my pocket-handkerchief, I
could not but consider it fair game, under the
circumstances, and was grateful to the thief for
sparing me my purse. They were quiet, civil, and
remarkably good-humored, making due allowance for the
national gruffness; there was no riot, no tumultuous
swaying to and fro of the mass, such as I have often
noted in an American crowd; no noise of voices, except
frequent bursts of laughter, hoarse or shrill, and a
widely diffused, inarticulate murmur, resembling
nothing so much as the rumbling of the tide among the
arches of London Bridge. What immensely perplexed me
was a sharp, angry sort of rattle, in all quarters,
far off and close at hand, and sometimes right at my
own back, where it sounded as if the stout fabric of
my English surtout had been ruthlessly rent in twain;
and everybody's clothes, all over the fair, were
evidently being torn asunder in the same way. By and
by, I discovered that this strange noise was produced
by a little instrument called "The Fun of the
Fair,"--a sort of rattle, consisting of a wooden
wheel, the cogs of which turn against a thin slip of
wood, and so produce a rasping sound when drawn
smartly against a person's back. The ladies draw
their rattles against the backs of their male friends
(and everybody passes for a friend at Greenwich Fair),
and the young men return the compliment on the broad
British backs of the ladies; and all are bound by
immemorial custom to take it in good part and be merry
at the joke. As it was one of my prescribed official
duties to give an account of such mechanical
contrivances as might be unknown in my own country, I
have thought it right to be thus particular in
describing the Fun of the Fair.

But this was far from being the sole amusement.
There were theatrical booths, in front of which were
pictorial representations of the scenes to be enacted
within; and anon a drummer emerged from one of them,
thumping on a terribly lax drum, and followed by the
entire dramatis personæ, who ranged
themselves on a wooden platform in front of the
theatre. They were dressed in character, but wofully
shabby, with very dingy and wrinkled white tights,
threadbare cotton-velvets, crumpled silks, and crushed
muslin, and all the gloss and glory gone out of their
aspect and attire, seen thus in the broad daylight and
after a long series of performances. They sang a song
together, and withdrew into the theatre, whither the
public were invited to follow them at the
inconsiderable cost of a penny a ticket. Before
another booth stood a pair of brawny fighting-men,
displaying their muscle, and soliciting patronage for
an exhibition of the noble British art of pugilism.
There were pictures of giants, monsters, and
outlandish beasts, most prodigious, to be sure, and
worthy of all admiration, unless the artist had gone
incomparably beyond his subject. Jugglers proclaimed
aloud the miracles which they were prepared to work;
and posture-makers dislocated every joint of their
bodies and tied their limbs into inextricable knots,
wherever they could find space to spread a little
square of carpet on the ground. In the midst of the
confusion, while everybody was treading on his
neighbor's toes, some little boys were very
solicitous to brush your boots. These lads, I believe,
are a product of modern society,--at least, no older
than the time of Gay, who celebrates their origin in
his "Trivia"; but in most other respects the scene
reminded me of Bunyan's description of Vanity
Fair,--nor isit at
all improbable that the Pilgrim may have been a
merry-maker here in his wild youth.

It seemed very singular--though, of course, I
immediately classified it as an English
characteristic--to see a great many portable
weighing-machines, the owners of which cried out
continually and amain, "Come, know your weight!
Come, come, know your weight to-day! Come, know your
weight!" and a multitude of people, mostly large
in the girth, were moved by this vociferation to sit
down in the machines. I know not whether they valued
themselves on their beef, and estimated their standing
as members of society at so much a pound; but I shall
set it down as a national peculiarity, and a symbol of
the prevalence of the earthly over the spiritual
element, that Englishmen are wonderfully bent on
knowing how solid and physically ponderous they are.

On the whole, having an appetite for the brown
bread and the tripe and sausages of life, as well as
for its nicer cates and dainties, I enjoyed the scene,
and was amused at the sight of a gruff old Greenwich
pensioner, who, forgetful of the sailor-frolics of his
young days, stood looking with grim disapproval at all
these vanities. Thus we squeezed our way through the
mob-jammed town, and emerged into the Park, where,
likewise, we met a great many merry-makers, but with
freer space for their gambols than in the streets. We
soon found ourselves the targets for a cannonade with
oranges (most of them in a decayed condition), which
went humming past our ears from the vantage-ground of
neighboring hillocks, sometimes hitting our sacred
persons with an inelastic thump. This was one of the
privileged freedoms of the time, and was nowise to be
resented, except by returning the salute. Manypersons were running
races, hand in hand, down the declivities, especially
that steepest one on the summit of which stands the
world-central Observatory, and (as in the race of
life) the partners were usually male and female, and
often caught a tumble together before reaching the
bottom of the hill. Hereabouts we were pestered and
haunted by two young girls, the eldest not more than
thirteen, teasing us to buy matches; and finding no
market for their commodity, the taller one suddenly
turned a somerset before our faces, and rolled heels
over head from top to bottom of the hill on which we
stood. Then, scrambling up the acclivity, the
topsy-turvy trollop offered us her matches again, as
demurely as if she had never flung aside her
equilibrium; so that, dreading a repetition of the
feat, we gave her sixpence and an admonition, and
enjoined her never to do so any more.

The most curious amusement that we witnessed
here--or anywhere else, indeed--was an ancient and
hereditary pastime called "Kissing in the
Ring." I shall describe the sport exactly as I
saw it, although an English friend assures me that
there are certain ceremonies with a handkerchief,
which make it much more decorous and graceful. A
handkerchief, indeed! There was no such thing in the
crowd, except it were the one which they had just
filched out of my pocket. It is one of the simplest
kinds of games, needing little or no practice to make
the player altogether perfect; and the manner of it is
this. A ring is formed (in the present case, it was of
large circumference and thickly gemmed around with
faces, mostly on the broad grin), into the centre of
which steps an adventurous youth, and, looking round
the circle, selects whatever maiden may most delight
his eye. Hepresents his hand (which she is
bound to accept), leads her into the centre, salutes
her on the lips, and retires, taking his stand in the
expectant circle. The girl, in her turn, throws a
favorable regard on some fortunate young man, offers
her hand to lead him forth, makes him happy with a
maidenly kiss, and withdraws to hide her blushes, if
any there be, among the simpering faces in the ring;
while the favored swain loses no time in transferring
her salute to the prettiest and plumpest among the
many mouths that are primming themselves in
anticipation. And thus the thing goes on, till all the
festive throng are inwreathed and intertwined into an
endless and inextricable chain of kisses; though,
indeed, it smote me with compassion to reflect that
some forlorn pair of lips might be left out, and never
know the triumph of a salute, after throwing aside so
many delicate reserves for the sake of winning it. If
the young men had any chivalry, there was a fair
chance to display it by kissing the homeliest damsel
in the circle.

To be frank, however, at the first glance, and to
my American eye, they looked all homely alike, and the
chivalry that I suggest is more than I could have been
capable of, at any period of my life. They seemed to
be country-lasses, of sturdy and wholesome aspect,
with coarse-grained, cabbage-rosy cheeks, and, I am
willing to suppose, a stout texture of moral
principle, such as would bear a good deal of rough
usage without suffering much detriment. But how unlike
the trim little damsels of my native land! I desire
above all things to be courteous; but, since the plain
truth must be told, the soil and climate of England
produce feminine beauty as rarely as they do delicate
fruit; and though admirable specimens of both are to
be metwith, they
are the hothouse ameliorations of refined society, and
apt, moreover, to relapse into the coarseness of the
original stock. The men are manlike, but the women are
not beautiful, though the female Bull be well enough
adapted to the male. To return to the lasses of
Greenwich Fair, their charms were few, and their
behavior, perhaps, not altogether commendable; and yet
it was impossible not to feel a degree of faith in
their innocent intentions, with such a half-bashful
zest and entire simplicity did they keep up their part
of the game. It put the spectator in good-humor to
look at them, because there was still something of the
old Arcadian life, the secure freedom of the antique
age, in their way of surrendering their lips to
strangers, as if there were no evil or impurity in the
world. As for the young men, they were chiefly
specimens of the vulgar sediment of London life, often
shabbily genteel, rowdyish, pale, wearing the
unbrushed coat, unshifted linen, and unwashed faces of
yesterday, as well as the haggardness of last
night's jollity in a gin-shop. Gathering their
character from these tokens, I wondered whether there
were any reasonable prospect of their fair partners
returning to their rustic homes with as much innocence
(whatever were its amount or quality) as they brought
to Greenwich Fair, in spite of the perilous
familiarity established by Kissing in the Ring.

The manifold disorders resulting from the fair, at
which a vast city was brought into intimate relations
with a comparatively rural district, have at length
led to its suppression; this was the very last
celebration of it, and brought to a close the
broad-mouthed merriment of many hundred years. Thus my
poor sketch, faint as its colors are, may acquire some
little value inthe
reader's eyes from the consideration that no
observer of the coming time will ever have an
opportunity to give a better. I should find it
difficult to believe, however, that the queer pastime
just described, or any moral mischief to which that
and other customs might pave the way, can have led to
the overthrow of Greenwich Fair; for it has often
seemed to me that Englishmen of station and
respectability, unless of a peculiarly philanthropic
turn, have neither any faith in the feminine purity of
the lower orders of their countrywomen, nor the
slightest value for it, allowing its possible
existence. The distinction of ranks is so marked, that
the English cottage damsel holds a position somewhat
analogous to that of the negro girl in our Southern
States. Hence comes inevitable detriment to the moral
condition of those men themselves, who forget that the
humblest woman has a right and a duty to hold herself
in the same sanctity as the highest. The subject
cannot well be discussed in these pages; but I offer
it as a serious conviction, from what I have been able
to observe, that the England of to-day is the
unscrupulous old England of Tom Jones and Joseph
Andrews, Humphrey Clinker and Roderick Random; and in
our refined era, just the same as at that more
free-spoken epoch, this singular people has a certain
contempt for any fine-strained purity, any special
squeamishness, as they consider it, on the part of an
ingenuous youth. They appear to look upon it as a
suspicious phenomenon in the masculine character.

Nevertheless, I by no means take upon me to affirm
that English morality, as regards the phase here
alluded to, is really at a lower point than our own.
Assuredly, I hope so, because, making a higherpretension, or, at all
events, more carefully hiding whatever may be amiss,
we are either better than they, or necessarily a great
deal worse. It impressed me that their open avowal and
recognition of immoralities served to throw the
disease to the surface, where it might be more
effectually dealt with, and leave a sacred interior
not utterly profaned, instead of turning its poison
back among the inner vitalities of the character, at
the imminent risk of corrupting them all. Be that as
it may, these Englishmen are certainly a franker and
simpler people than ourselves, from peer to peasant;
but if we can take it as compensatory on our part
(which I leave to be considered) that they owe those
noble and manly qualities to a coarser grain in their
nature, and that, with a finer one in ours, we shall
ultimately acquire a marble polish of which they are
unsusceptible, I believe that this may be the truth.

UP THE THAMES.

THE upper portion of Greenwich (where my last
article left me loitering) is a cheerful, comely,
old-fashioned town, the peculiarities of which, if
there be any, have passed out of my remembrance. As
you descend towards the Thames the streets get meaner,
and the shabby and sunken houses, elbowing one another
for frontage, bear the sign-boards of beer-shops and
eating-rooms, with especial promises of white-bait and
other delicacies in the fishing line. You observe,
also, a frequent announcement of "Tea
Gardens" in the rear; although, estimating the
capacity of the premises by their external compass,
the entire sylvan charm and shadowy seclusion of such
blissful resorts must be limited within a small
back-yard. These places of cheap sustenance and
recreation depend for support upon the innumerable
pleasure-parties who come from London Bridge by
steamer, at a fare of a few pence, and who get as
enjoyable a meal for a shilling a head as the Ship
Hotel would afford a gentleman for a guinea.

The steamers, which are constantly smoking their
pipes up and down the Thames, offer much the most
agreeable mode of getting to London. At least, it
might be exceedingly agreeable, except for the myriad
floating particles of soot from the stove-pipe, and
the heavy heat of midsummer sunshine on the
unsheltered deck, or the chill, misty air-draught of a
cloudy day, and the spiteful little showers of rain
that may spatterdown upon you at any moment,
whatever the promise of the sky; besides which there
is some slight inconvenience from the inexhaustible
throng of passengers, who scarcely allow you
standing-room, nor so much as a breath of
unappropriated air, and never a chance to sit down. If
these difficulties, added to the possibility of
getting your pocket picked, weigh little with you, the
panorama along the shores of the memorable river, and
the incidents and shows of passing life upon its
bosom, render the trip far preferable to the brief yet
tiresome shoot along the railway track. On one such
voyage, a regatta of wherries raced past us, and at
once involved every soul on board our steamer in the
tremendous excitement of the struggle. The spectacle
was but a moment within our view, and presented
nothing more than a few light skiffs, in each of which
sat a single rower, bare-armed, and with little
apparel, save a shirt and drawers, pale, anxious, with
every muscle on the stretch, and plying his oars in
such fashion that the boat skimmed along with the
aerial celerity of a swallow. I wondered at myself for
so immediately catching an interest in the affair,
which seemed to contain no very exalted rivalship of
manhood; but, whatever the kind of battle or the prize
of victory, it stirs one's sympathy immensely,
and is even awful, to behold the rare sight of a man
thoroughly in earnest, doing his best, putting forth
all there is in him, and staking his very soul (as
these rowers appeared willing to do) on the issue of
the contest. It was the seventy-fourth annual regatta
of the Free Watermen of Greenwich, and announced
itself as under the patronage of the Lord Mayor and
other distinguished individuals, at whose expense, I
suppose, a prize-boat was offered to the conqueror,and some small amounts
of money to the inferior competitors.

The aspect of London along the Thames, below
Bridge, as it is called, is by no means so impressive
as it ought to be, considering what peculiar
advantages are offered for the display of grand and
stately architecture by the passage of a river through
the midst of a great city. It seems, indeed, as if the
heart of London had been cleft open for the mere
purpose of showing how rotten and drearily mean it had
become. The shore is lined with the shabbiest,
blackest, and ugliest buildings that can be imagined,
decayed warehouses with blind windows, and wharves
that look ruinous; insomuch that, had I known nothing
more of the world's metropolis, I might have
fancied that it had already experienced the downfall
which I have heard commercial and financial prophets
predict for it, within the century. And the muddy tide
of the Thames, reflecting nothing, and hiding a
million of unclean secrets within its breast,--a sort
of guilty conscience, as it were, unwholesome with the
rivulets of sin that constantly flow into it,--is just
the dismal stream to glide by such a city. The
surface, to be sure, displays no lack of activity,
being fretted by the passage of a hundred steamers and
covered with a good deal of shipping, but mostly of a
clumsier build than I had been accustomed to see in
the Mersey: a fact which I complacently attributed to
the smaller number of American clippers in the Thames,
and the less prevalent influence of American example
in refining away the broad-bottomed capacity of the
old Dutch or English models.

About midway between Greenwich and London Bridge,
at a rude landing-place on the left bank ofthe river, the steamer
rings its bell and makes a momentary pause in front of
a large circular structure, where it may be worth our
while to scramble ashore. It indicates the locality
of one of those prodigious practical blunders that
would supply John Bull with a topic of inexhaustible
ridicule, if his cousin Jonathan had committed them,
but of which he himself perpetrates ten to our one in
the mere wantonness of wealth that lacks better
employment. The circular building covers the entrance
to the Thames Tunnel, and is surmounted by a dome of
glass, so as to throw daylight down into the great
depth at which the passage of the river commences.
Descending a wearisome succession of staircases, we at
last find ourselves, still in the broad noon, standing
before a closed door, on opening which we behold the
vista of an arched corridor that extends into
everlasting midnight. In these days, when glass has
been applied to so many new purposes, it is a pity
that the architect had not thought of arching portions
of his abortive tunnel with immense blocks of the
lucid substance, over which the dusky Thames would
have flowed like a cloud, making the sub-fluvial
avenue only a little gloomier than a street of upper
London. At present, it is illuminated at regular
intervals by jets of gas, not very brilliantly, yet
with lustre enough to show the damp plaster of the
ceiling and walls, and the massive stone pavement, the
crevices of which are oozy with moisture, not from the
incumbent river, but from hidden springs in the
earth's deeper heart. There are two parallel
corridors, with a wall between, for the separate
accommodation of the double throng of foot-passengers,
equestrians, and vehicles of all kinds, which was
expected to roll and reverberate continually through
the Tunnel. Onlyone
of them has ever been opened, and its echoes are but
feebly awakened by infrequent footfalls.

Yet there seem to be people who spend their lives
here, and who probably blink like owls, when, once or
twice a year, perhaps, they happen to climb into the
sunshine. All along the corridor, which I believe to
be a mile in extent, we see stalls or shops in little
alcoves, kept principally by women; they were of a
ripe age, I was glad to observe, and certainly robbed
England of none of its very moderate supply of
feminine loveliness by their deeper than tomb-like
interment. As you approach (and they are so accustomed
to the dusky gaslight that they read all your
characteristics afar off), they assail you with hungry
entreaties to buy some of their merchandise, holding
forth views of the Tunnel put up in cases of
Derbyshire spar, with a magnifying-glass at one end to
make the vista more effective. They offer you,
besides, cheap jewelry, sunny topazes and resplendent
emeralds for sixpence, and diamonds as big as the
Koh-i-noor at a not much heavier cost, together with a
multifarious trumpery which has died out of the upper
world to reappear in this Tartarean bazaar. That you
may fancy yourself still in the realms of the living,
they urge you to partake of cakes, candy, ginger-beer,
and such small refreshment, more suitable, however,
for the shadowy appetite of ghosts than for the sturdy
stomachs of Englishmen. The most capacious of the
shops contains a dioramic exhibition of cities and
scenes in the daylight world, with a dreary glimmer of
gas among them all; so that they serve well enough to
represent the dim, unsatisfactory remembrances that
dead people might be supposed to retain from their
past lives, mixing them up with the ghastliness of
their unsubstantialstate. I dwell the more upon these
trifles, and do my best to give them a mockery of
importance, because, if these are nothing, then all
this elaborate contrivance and mighty piece of work
has been wrought in vain. The Englishman has burrowed
under the bed of his great river, and set ships of two
or three thousand tons a-rolling over his head, only
to provide new sites for a few old women to sell cakes
and ginger-beer!

Yet the conception was a grand one; and though it
has proved an absolute failure, swallowing an
immensity of toil and money, with anual returns hardly
sufficient to keep the pavement free from the ooze of
subterranean springs, yet it needs, I presume only an
expenditure three or four (or, for aught I know,
twenty) times as large, to make the enterprise
brilliantly successful. The descent is so great from
the bank of the river to its surface, and the Tunnel
dips so profoundly under the river's bed, that
the approaches on either side must commence a long way
off, in order to render the entrance accessible to
horsemen or vehicles; so that the larger part of the
cost of the whole affair should have been expended on
its margins. It has turned out a sublime piece of
folly; and when the New-Zealander of distant ages
shall have moralized sufficiently among the ruins of
London Bridge, he will bethink himself that somewhere
thereabout was the marvellous Tunnel, the very
existence of which will seem to him as incredible as
that of the hanging gardens of Babylon. But the Thames
will long ago have broken through the massive arch,
and choked up the corridors with mud and sand and with
the large stones of the structure itself, intermixed
with skeletons of drowned people, the rusty ironwork
of sunken vessels, and the great many such precious
andcurious things
as a river always contrives to hide in its bosom; the
entrance will have been obliterated, and its very site
forgotten beyond the memory of twenty generations of
men, and the whole neighborhood be held a dangerous
spot on account of the malaria; insomuch that the
traveller will make but a brief and careless
inquisition for the traces of the old wonder, and will
stake his credit before the public, in some Pacific
Monthly of that day, that the story of it is but a
myth, though enriched with a spiritual profundity
which he will proceed to unfold.

Yet it is impossible (for a Yankee, at least) to
see so much magnificent ingenuity thrown away, without
trying to endow the unfortunate result with some kind
of usefulness, though perhaps widely different from
the purpose of its original conception. In former
ages, the mile-long corridors, with. their numerous
alcoves, might have been utilized as a series of
dungeons, the fittest of all possible receptacles for
prisoners of state. Dethroned monarchs and fallen
statesmen would not have needed to remonstrate against
a domicile so spacious, so deeply secluded from the
world's scorn, and so admirably in accordance with
their thenceforward sunless fortunes. An alcove here
might have suited Sir Walter Raleigh better than that
darksome hiding-place communicating with the great
chamber in the Tower, pacing from end to end of which
he meditated upon his "History of the
World." His track would here have been straight
and narrow, indeed, and would therefore have lacked
somewhat of the freedom that his intellect demanded;
and yet the length to which his footsteps might have
travelled forth and retraced themselves would partly
have harmonized his physical movement with the grand
curves and planetary returnsof his thought, through cycles of
majestic periods. Having it in his mind to compose
the world's history, methinks he could have asked
no better retirement than such a cloister as this,
insulated from all the seductions of mankind and
womankind, deep beneath their mysteries and motives,
down into the heart of things, full of personal
reminiscences in order to the comprehensive
measurement and verification of historic records,
seeing into the secrets of human nature,--secrets
that daylight never yet revealed to mortal,--but
detecting their whole scope and purport with the
infallible eyes of unbroken solitude and night. And
then the shades of the old mighty men might have risen
from their still profounder abodes and joined him in
the dim corridor, treading beside him with an antique
stateliness of mien, telling him in melancholy tones,
grand, but always melancholy, of the greater ideas and
purposes which their most renowned performances so
imperfectly carried out, that, magnificent successes
in the view of all posterity, they were but failures
to those who planned them. As Raleigh was a navigator,
Noah would have explained to him the peculiarities of
construction that made the ark so seaworthy; as
Raleigh was a statesman, Moses would have discussed
with him the principles of laws and government; as
Raleigh was a soldier, Cæsar and Hannibal would
have held debate in his presence, with this martial
student for their umpire; as Raleigh was a poet,
David, or whatever most illustrious bard he might call
up, would have touched his harp, and made manifest all
the true significance of the past by means of song and
the subtle intelligences of music. Meanwhile, I had
forgotten that Sir Walter Raleigh's century knew
nothing of gaslight, and that itwould require a prodigious and
wasteful expenditure of tallow-candles to illuminate
the Tunnel sufficiently to discern even a ghost. On
this account, however, it would be all the more
suitable place of confinement for a metaphysician, to
keep him from bewildering mankind with his shadowy
speculations; and, being shut off from external
converse, the dark corridor would help him to make
rich discoveries in those cavernous regions and
mysterious by-paths of the intellect, which he had so
long accustomed himself to explore. But how would
every successive age rejoice in so secure a habitation
for its reformers, and especially for each best and
wisest man that happened to be then alive! He seeks to
burn up our whole system of society, under pretence of
purifying it from its abuses! Away with him into the
Tunnel, and let him begin by setting the Thames on
fire, if he is able!

If not precisely these, yet akin to these were some
of the fantasies that haunted me as I passed under the
river: for the place is suggestive of such idle and
irresponsible stuff by its own abortive character, its
lack of whereabout on upper earth, or any solid
foundation of realities. Could I have looked forward a
few years, I might have regretted that American
enterprise had not provided a similar tunnel, under
the Hudson or the Potomac, for the convenience of our
National Government in times hardly yet gone by. It
would be delightful to clap up all the enemies of our
peace and Union in the dark together, and there let
them abide, listening to the monotonous roll of the
river above their heads, or perhaps in a state of
miraculously suspended animation, until,--be it after
months, years, or centuries,--when the turmoil shall
be all over, the Wrong washed away in blood (since
that must needsbe
the cleansing fluid), and the Right firmly rooted in
the soil which that blood will have enriched, they
might crawl forth again and catch a single glimpse at
their redeemed country, and feel it to be a better
land than they deserve, and die!

I was not sorry when the daylight reached me after
a much briefer abode in the nether regions than, I
fear, would await the troublesome personages just
hinted at. Emerging on the Surrey side of the Thames,
I found myself in Rotherhithe, a neighborhood not
unfamiliar to the readers of old books of maritime
adventure. There being a ferry hard by the mouth of
the Tunnel, I recrossed the river in the primitive
fashion of an open boat, which the conflict of wind
and tide, together with the swash and swell of the
passing steamers, tossed high and low rather
tumultuously. This inquietude of our frail skiff
(which, indeed, bobbed up and down like a cork) so
much alarmed an old lady, the only other passenger,
that the boatmen essayed to comfort her. "Never
fear, mother!" grumbled one of them,
"we'll make the river as smooth as we can
for you. We'll get a plane, and plane down the
waves!" The joke may not read very brilliantly;
but I make bold to record it as the only specimen that
reached my ears of the old, rough water-wit for which
the Thames used to be so celebrated. Passing directly
along the line of the sunken Tunnel, we landed in
Wapping, which I should have presupposed to be the
most tarry and pitchy spot on earth, swarming with old
salts, and full of warm, bustling, coarse, homely, and
cheerful life. Nevertheless, it turned out to be a
cold and torpid neighborhood, mean, shabby, and
unpicturesque, both as to its buildings and
inhabitants: the lattercomprising (so far as was visible
to me) not a single unmistakable sailor, though plenty
of land-sharks, who get a half-dishonest livelihood by
business connected with the sea. Ale and spirit vaults
(as petty drinking-establishments are styled in
England, pretending to contain vast cellars full of
liquor within the compass of ten feet square above
ground) were particularly abundant, together with
apples, oranges, and oysters, the stalls of
fishmongers and butchers, and slop-shops, where blue
jackets and duck trousers swung and capered before the
doors. Everything was on the poorest scale, and the
place bore an aspect of unredeemable decay. From this
remote point of London, I strolled leisurely towards
the heart of the city; while the streets, at first but
thinly occupied by man or vehicle, got more and more
thronged with foot-passengers, carts, drays, cabs, and
the all-pervading and all-accommodating omnibus. But I
lack courage, and feel that I should lack
perseverance, as the gentlest reader would lack
patience, to undertake a descriptive stroll through
London streets; more especially as there would be a
volume ready for the printer before we could reach a
midway resting-place at Charing Cross. It will be the
easier course to step aboard another passing steamer,
and continue our trip up the Thames.

The next notable group of objects is an assemblage
of ancient walls, battlements, and turrets, out of the
midst of which rises prominently one great square
tower, of a grayish hue, bordered with white stone,
and having a small turret at each corner of the roof.
This central structure is the White Tower, and the
whole circuit of ramparts and enclosed edifices
constitutes what is known in English history, and
still morewidely
and impressively in English poetry, as the Tower. A
crowd of river-craft are generally moored in front of
it; but if we look sharply at the right moment under
the base of the rampart, we may catch a glimpse of an
arched water-entrance, half submerged, past which the
Thames glides as indifferently as if it were the mouth
of a city-kennel. Nevertheless, it is the
Traitor's Gate, a dreary kind of triumphal
passageway (now supposed to be shut up and barred
forever), through which a multitude of noble and
illustrious personages have entered the Tower and
found it a brief resting-place on their way to heaven.
Passing it many times, I never observed that anybody
glanced at this shadowy and ominous trap-door, save
myself. It is well that America exists, if it were
only that her vagrant children may be impressed and
affected by the historical monuments of England in a
degree of which the native inhabitants are evidently
incapable. These matters are too familiar, too real,
and too hopelessly built in amongst and mixed up with
the common objects and affairs of life, to be easily
susceptible of imaginative coloring in their minds;
and even their poets and romancers feel it a toil, and
almost a delusion, to extract poetic material out of
what seems embodied poetry itself to an American. An
Englishman cares nothing about the Tower, which to us
is a haunted castle in dreamland. That honest and
excellent gentleman, the late Mr. G. P. R. James
(whose mechanical ability, one might have supposed,
would nourish itself by devouring every old stone of
such a structure), once assured me that he had never
in his life set eyes upon the Tower, though for years
an historic novelist in London.

Not to spend a whole summer's day upon thevoyage, we will
suppose ourselves to have reached London Bridge, and
thence to have taken another steamer for a farther
passage up the river. But here the memorable objects
succeed each other so rapidly that I can spare but a
single sentence even for the great Dome, though I deem
it more picturesque, in that dusky atmosphere, than
St. Peter's in its clear blue sky. I must
mention, however (since everything connected with
royalty is especially interesting to my dear
countrymen), that I once saw a large and beautiful
barge, splendidly gilded and ornamented, and
overspread with a rich covering, lying at the pier
nearest to St. Paul's Cathedral; it had the royal
banner of Great Britain displayed, besides being
decorated with a number of other flags; and many
footmen (who are universally the grandest and gaudiest
objects to be seen in England at this day, and these
were regal ones, in a bright scarlet livery bedizened
with gold-lace, and white silk stockings) were in
attendance. I know not what festive or ceremonial
occasion may have drawn out this pageant; after all,
it might have been merely a city-spectacle,
appertaining to the Lord Mayor; but the sight had its
value in bringing vividly before me the grand old
times when the sovereign and nobles were accustomed to
use the Thames as the high street of the metropolis,
and join in pompous processions upon it; whereas, the
desuetude of such customs, nowadays, has caused the
whole show of river-life to consist in a multitude of
smoke-begrimed steamers. An analogous change has taken
place in the streets, where cabs and the omnibus have
crowded out a rich variety of vehicles; and thus life
gets more monotonous in hue from age to age, and
appears to seize every opportunity to strip off a bit
of its gold-lace among the wealthier classes, and to
make itself decent in the lower ones.

Yonder is Whitefriars, the old rowdy Alsatia, now
wearing as decorous a face as any other portion of
London; and, adjoining it, the avenues and brick
squares of the Temple, with that historic garden,
close upon the river-side, and still rich in shrubbery
and flowers, where the partisans of York and Lancaster
plucked the fatal roses, and scattered their pale and
bloody petals over so many English battle-fields.
Hard by, we see the long white front or rear of
Somerset House, and, farther on, rise the two new
Houses of Parliament, with a huge unfinished tower
already hiding its imperfect summit in the smoky
canopy,--the whole vast and cumbrous edifice a
specimen of the best that modern architecture can
effect, elaborately imitating the masterpieces of
those simple ages when men "builded better than
they knew." Close by it, we have a glimpse of the
roof and upper towers of the holy Abbey; while that
gray, ancestral pile on the opposite side of the river
is Lambeth Palace, a venerable group of halls and
turrets, chiefly built of brick, but with at least one
large tower of stone. In our course, we have passed
beneath half a dozen bridges, and, emerging out of the
black heart of London, shall soon reach a cleanly
suburb, where old Father Thames, if I remember, begins
to put on an aspect of unpolluted innocence. And now
we look back upon the mass of innumerable roofs, out
of which rise steeples, towers, columns, and the great
crowning Dome,--look back, in short, upon that mystery
of the world's proudest city, amid which a man so
longs and loves to be; not, perhaps, because it
contains much that is positively admirable and
enjoyable, but because, at all events, the world has
nothing better. The cream of external life is there;
and whatever merely intellectual or materialgood we fail to find
perfect in London, we may as well content ourselves to
seek that unattainable thing no farther on this earth.

The steamer terminates its trip at Chelsea, an old
town endowed with a prodigious number of pothouses,
and some famous gardens, called the Cremorne, for
public amusement. The most noticeable thing, however,
is Chelsea Hospital, which, like that of Greenwich,
was founded, I believe, by Charles II. (whose bronze
statue, in the guise of an old Roman, stands in the
centre of the quadrangle), and appropriated as a home
for aged and infirm soldiers of the British army. The
edifices are of three stories, with windows in the
high roofs, and are built of dark, sombre brick, with
stone edgings and facings. The effect is by no means
that of grandeur (which is somewhat disagreeably an
attribute of Greenwich Hospital), but a quiet and
venerable neatness. At each extremity of the
street-front there is a spacious and hospitably open
gateway, lounging about which I saw some gray veterans
in long scarlet coats of an antique fashion, and the
cocked hats of a century ago, or occasionally a modern
foraging-cap. Almost all of them moved with a
rheumatic gait, two or three stumped on wooden legs,
and here and there an arm was missing. Inquiring of
one of these fragmentary heroes whether a stranger
could be admitted to see the establishment, he replied
most cordially, "Oh yes, sir,--anywhere! Walk in and
go where you please,--up stairs, or anywhere!" So
I entered, and, passing along the inner side of the
quadrangle, came to the door of the chapel, which
forms a part of the contiguity of edifices next the
street. Here another pensioner, an old warrior of
exceedingly peaceable and Christian demeanor, touched
histhree-cornered
hat and asked if I wished to see the interior; to
which I assenting, he unlocked the door, and we went
in.

The chapel consists of a great hall with a vaulted
roof, and over the altar is a large painting in
fresco, the subject of which I did not trouble myself
to make out. More appropriate adornments of the place,
dedicated as well to martial reminiscences as
religious worship, are the long ranges of dusty and
tattered banners, that hang from their staves all
round the ceiling of the chapel. They are trophies of
battles fought and won in every quarter of the world,
comprising the captured flags of all the nations with
whom the British lion has waged war since James
II.'s time,--French, Dutch, East Indian,
Prussian, Russian, Chinese, and American,--collected
together in this consecrated spot, not to symbolize
that there shall be no more discord upon earth, but
drooping over the aisle in sullen, though peaceable
humiliation. Yes, I said "American" among the
rest; for the good old pensioner mistook me for an
Englishman, and failed not to point out (and,
methought, with an especial emphasis of triumph) some
flags that had been taken at Bladensburg and
Washington. I fancied, indeed, that they hung a little
higher and drooped a little lower than any of their
companions in disgrace. It is a comfort, however, that
their proud devices are already indistinguishable, or
nearly so, owing to dust and tatters and the kind
offices of the moths, and that they will soon rot from
the banner-staves and be swept out in unrecognized
fragments from the chapel-door.

It is a good method of teaching a man how
imperfectly cosmopolitan he is, to show him his
country's flag occupying a position of dishonor in a
foreignland. But,
in truth, the whole system of a people crowing over
its military triumphs had far better be dispensed
with, both on account of the ill-blood that it helps
to keep fermenting among the nations, and because it
operates as an accumulative inducement to future
generations to aim at a kind of glory, the gain of
which has generally proved more ruinous than its loss.
I heartily wish that every trophy of victory might
crumble away, and that every reminiscence or tradition
of a hero, from the beginning of the world to this
day, could pass out of all men's memories at once
and forever. I might feel very differently, to be
sure, if we Northerners had anything especially
valuable to lose by the fading of those illuminated
names.

I gave the pensioner (but I am afraid there may
have been a little affectation in it) a magnificent
guerdon of all the silver I had in my pocket, to
requite him for having unintentionally stirred up my
patriotic susceptibilities. He was a meek-looking,
kindly old man, with a humble freedom and affability
of manner that made it pleasant to converse with him.
Old soldiers, I know not why, seem to be more
accostable than old sailors. One is apt to hear a
growl beneath the smoothest courtesy of the latter.
The mild veteran, with his peaceful voice, and gentle
reverend aspect, told me that he had fought at a
cannon all through the Battle of Waterloo, and escaped
unhurt; he had now been in the hospital four or five
years, and was married, but necessarily underwent a
separation from his wife, who lived outside of the
gates. To my inquiry whether his fellow-pensioners
were comfortable and happy, he answered, with great
alacrity, "Oh yes, sir!" qualifying his
evidence, after a moment'sconsideration, by saying in an
undertone, "There are some people, your Honor
knows, who could not be comfortable anywhere." I
did know it, and fear that the system of Chelsea
Hospital allows too little of that wholesome care and
regulation of their own occupations and interests
which might assuage the sting of life to those
naturally uncomfortable individuals by giving them
something external to think about. But my old friend
here was happy in the hospital, and by this time, very
likely, is happy in heaven, in spite of the bloodshed
that he may have caused by touching off a cannon at
Waterloo.

Crossing Battersea Bridge, in the
neighborhood of Chelsea, I remember seeing a distant
gleam of the Crystal Palace, glimmering afar in the
afternoon sunshine like an imaginary structure,--an
air-castle by chance descended upon earth, and resting
there one instant before it vanished, as we sometimes
see a soap-bubble touch unharmed on the carpet,--a
thing of only momentary visibility and no substance,
destined to be overburdened and crushed down by the
first cloud-shadow that might fall upon that spot.
Even as I looked, it disappeared. Shall I attempt a
picture of this exhalation of modern ingenuity, or
what else shall I try to paint? Everything in London
and its vicinity has been depicted innumerable times,
but never once translated into intelligible images; it
is an "old, old story," never yet told, nor
to be told. While writing these reminiscences, I am
continually impressed with the futility of the effort
to give any creative truth to my sketch, so that it
might produce such pictures in the reader's mind
as would cause the original scenes to appear familiar
when afterwards beheld. Nor have other writers often
been moresuccessful
in representing definite objects prophetically to my
own mind. In truth, I believe that the chief delight
and advantage of this kind of literature is not for
any real information that it supplies to untravelled
people, but for reviving the recollections and
reawakening the emotions of persons already acquainted
with the scenes described. Thus I found an exquisite
pleasure, the other day, in reading Mr.
Tuckerman's "Month in England,"--a fine
example of the way in which a refined and cultivated
American looks at the Old Country, the things that he
naturally seeks there, and the modes of feeling and
reflection which they excite. Correct outlines avail
little or nothing, though truth of coloring may be
somewhat more efficacious. Impressions, however,
states of mind produced by interesting and remarkable
objects, these, if truthfully and vividly recorded,
may work a genuine effect, and, though but the result
of what we see, go further towards representing the
actual scene than any direct effort to paint it. Give
the emotions that cluster about it, and, without being
able to analyze the spell by which it is summoned up,
you get something like a simulachre of the object in
the midst of them. From some of the above reflections
I draw the comfortable inference, that, the longer and
better known a thing may be, so much the more eligible
is it as the subject of a descriptive sketch.

On a Sunday afternoon, I passed through a
side-entrance in the time-blackened wall of a place of
worship, and found myself among a congregation
assembled in one of the transepts and the immediately
contiguous portion of the nave. It was a vast old
edifice, spacious enough, within the extent covered by
its pillared roof and overspread by its stone
pavement,to
accommodate the whole of church-going London, and with
a far wider and loftier concave than any human power
of lungs could fill with audible prayer. Oaken
benches were arranged in the transept, on one of which
I seated myself, and joined, as well as I knew how, in
the sacred business that was going forward. But when
it came to the sermon, the voice of the preacher was
puny, and so were his thoughts, and both seemed
impertinent at such a time and place, where he and all
of us were bodily included within a sublime act of
religion, which could be seen above and around us and
felt beneath our feet. The structure itself was the
worship of the devout men of long ago, miraculously
preserved in stone without losing an atom of its
fragrance and fervor; it was a kind of anthem-strain
that they had sung and poured out of the organ in
centuries gone by; and being so grand and sweet, the
Divine benevolence had willed it to be prolonged for
the behoof of auditors unborn. I therefore came to the
conclusion, that, in my individual case, it would be
better and more reverent to let my eyes wander about
the edifice than to fasten them and my thoughts on the
evidently uninspired mortal who was venturing--and
felt it no venture at all--to speak here above his
breath.

The interior of Westminster Abbey (for the reader
recognized it, no doubt, the moment we entered) is
built of rich brown stone; and the whole of it--the
lofty roof, the tall, clustered pillars, and the
pointed arches--appears to be in consummate repair. At
all points where decay has laid its finger, the
structure is clamped with iron or otherwise carefully
protected; and being thus watched over,--whether as a
place of ancient sanctity, a noble specimen of Gothic
art, or anobject of
national interest and pride,--it may reasonably be
expected to survive for as many ages as have passed
over it already. It was sweet to feel its venerable
quietude, its long-enduring peace, and yet to observe
how kindly and even cheerfully it received the
sunshine of to-day, which fell from the great windows
into the fretted aisles and arches that laid aside
somewhat of their aged gloom to welcome it. Sunshine
always seems friendly to old abbeys, churches, and
castles, kissing them, as it were, with a more
affectionate, though still reverential familiarity,
than it accords to edifices of later date. A square of
golden light lay on the sombre pavement of the nave,
afar off, falling through the grand western entrance,
the folding leaves of which were wide open, and
afforded glimpses of people passing to and fro in the
outer world, while we sat dimly enveloped in the
solemnity of antique devotion. In the south transept,
separated from us by the full breadth of the minster,
there were painted glass windows, of which the
uppermost appeared to be a great orb of many-colored
radiance, being, indeed, a cluster of saints and
angels whose glorified bodies formed the rays of an
aureole emanating from a cross in the midst. These
windows are modern, but combine softness with
wonderful brilliancy of effect. Through the pillars
and arches, I saw that the walls in that distant
region of the edifice were almost wholly incrusted
with marble, now grown yellow with time, no blank,
unlettered slabs, but memorials of such men as their
respective generations deemed wisest and bravest. Some
of them were commemorated merely by inscriptions on
mural tablets, others by sculptured bas-reliefs,
others (once famous, but now forgotten, generals or
admirals, these) byponderous tombs that aspired
towards the roof of the aisle, or partly curtained the
immense arch of a window. These mountains of marble
were peopled with the sisterhood of Allegory, winged
trumpeters, and classic figures in full-bottomed
wigs; but it was strange to observe how the old Abbey
melted all such absurdities into the breadth of its
own grandeur, even magnifying itself by what would
elsewhere have been ridiculous. Methinks it is the
test of Gothic sublimity to overpower the ridiculous
without deigning to hide it; and these grotesque
monuments of the last century answer a similar purpose
with the grinning faces which the old architects
scattered among their most solemn conceptions.

From these distant wanderings (it was my first
visit to Westminster Abbey, and I would gladly have
taken it all in at a glance) my eyes came back and
began to investigate what was immediately about me in
the transept. Close at my elbow was the pedestal of
Canning's statue. Next beyond it was a massive
tomb, on the spacious tablet of which reposed the
full-length figures of a marble lord and lady, whom an
inscription announced to be the Duke and Duchess of
Newcastle,--the historic Duke of Charles I.'s
time, and the fantastic Duchess, traditionally
remembered by her poems and plays. She was of a
family, as the record on her tomb proudly informed us,
of which all the brothers had been valiant and all the
sisters virtuous. A recent statue of Sir John Malcolm,
the new marble as white as snow, held the next place;
and near by was a mural monument and bust of Sir Peter
Warren. The round visage of this old British admiral
has a certain interest for a New-Englander, because it
was by no merit of his own (though he took care toassume it as such),
but by the valor and warlike enterprise of our
colonial forefathers, especially the stout men of
Massachusetts, that he won rank and renown, and a tomb
in Westminster Abbey. Lord Mansfield, a huge mass of
marble done into the guise of a judicial gown and wig,
with a stern face in the midst of the latter, sat on
the other side of the transept; and on the pedestal
beside him was a figure of Justice, holding forth,
instead of the customary grocer's scales, an
actual pair of brass steelyards. It is an ancient and
classic instrument, undoubtedly; but I had supposed
that Portia (when Shylock's pound of flesh was to be
weighed) was the only judge that ever really called
for it in a court of justice. Pitt and Fox were in the
same distinguished company; and John Kemble, in Roman
costume, stood not far off, but strangely shorn of the
dignity that is said to have enveloped him like a
mantle in his lifetime. Perhaps the evanescent majesty
of the stage is incompatible with the long endurance
of marble and the solemn reality of the tomb; though,
on the other hand, almost every illustrious personage
here represented has been invested with more or less
of stage-trickery by his sculptor. In truth, the
artist (unless there be a divine efficacy in his
touch, making evident a heretofore hidden dignity in
the actual form) feels it an imperious law to remove
his subject as far from the aspect of ordinary life as
may be possible without sacrificing every trace of
resemblance. The absurd effect of the contrary course
is very remarkable in the statue of Mr. Wilberforce,
whose actual self, save for the lack of color, I
seemed to behold, seated just across the aisle.

This excellent man appears to have sunk into
himself in a sitting posture, with a thin leg crossed
overhis knee, a
book in one hand, and a finger of the other under his
chin, I believe, or applied to the side of his nose,
or to some equally familiar purpose; while his
exceedingly homely and wrinkled face, held a little on
one side, twinkles at you with the shrewdest
complacency, as if he were looking right into your
eyes, and twigged something there which you had half a
mind to conceal from him. He keeps this look so
pertinaciously that you feel it to be insufferably
impertinent, and bethink yourself what common ground
there may be between yourself and a stone image,
enabling you to resent it. I have no doubt that the
statue is as like Mr. Wilberforce as one pea to
another, and you might fancy, that, at some ordinary
moment, when he least expected it, and before he had
time to smooth away his knowing complication of
wrinkles, he had seen the Gorgon's head, and
whitened into marble,--not only his personal self, but
his coat and small-clothes, down to a button and the
minutest crease of the cloth. The ludicrous result
marks the impropriety of bestowing the age-long
duration of marble upon small, characteristic
individualities, such as might come within the
province of waxen imagery. The sculptor should give
permanence to the figure of a great man in his mood of
broad and grand composure, which would obliterate all
mean peculiarities; for, if the original were
unaccustomed to such a mood, or if his features were
incapable of assuming the guise, it seems questionable
whether he could really have been entitled to a marble
immortality. In point of fact, however, the English
face and form are seldom statuesque, however
illustrious the individual.

It ill becomes me, perhaps, to have lapsed into
this mood of half-jocose criticism in describing my
firstvisit to
Westminster Abbey, a spot which I had dreamed about
more reverentially, from my childhood upward, than any
other in the world, and which I then beheld, and now
look back upon, with profound gratitude to the men who
built it, and a kindly interest, I may add, in the
humblest personage that has contributed his little all
to its impressiveness, by depositing his dust or his
memory there. But it is a characteristic of this grand
edifice that it permits you to smile as freely under
the roof of its central nave as if you stood beneath
the yet grander canopy of heaven. Break into
laughter, if you feel inclined, provided the vergers
do not hear it echoing among the arches. In an
ordinary church you would keep your countenance for
fear of disturbing the sanctities or proprieties of
the place; but you need leave no honest and decorous
portion of your human nature outside of these benign
and truly hospitable walls. Their mild awfulness will
take care of itself. Thus it does no harm to the
general impression, when you come to be sensible that
many of the monuments are ridiculous, and commemorate
a mob of people who are mostly forgotten in their
graves, and few of whom ever deserved any better boon
from posterity. You acknowledge the force of Sir
Godfrey Kneller's objection to being buried in
Westminster Abbey, because "they do bury fools
there!" Nevertheless, these grotesque carvings of
marble, that break out in dingy-white blotches on the
old freestone of the interior walls, have come there
by as natural a process as might cause mosses and ivy
to cluster about the external edifice; for they are
the historical and biographical record of each
successive age, written with its own hand, and all the
truer for the inevitable mistakes, and none the less
solemn for the occasionalabsurdity. Though you entered the
Abbey expecting to see the tombs only of the
illustrious, you are content at last to read many
names, both in literature and history, that have now
lost the reverence of mankind, if indeed they ever
really possessed it. Let these men rest in peace. Even
if you miss a name or two that you hoped to find
there, they may well be spared. It matters little a
few more or less, or whether Westminster Abbey
contains or lacks any one man's grave, so long as the
Centuries, each with the crowd of personages that it
deemed memorable, have chosen it as their place of
honored sepulture, and laid themselves down under its
pavement. The inscriptions and devices on the walls
are rich with evidences of the fluctuating tastes,
fashions, manners, opinions, prejudices, follies,
wisdoms of the past, and thus they combine into a more
truthful memorial of their dead times than any
individual epitaph-maker ever meant to write.

When the services were over, many of the audience
seemed inclined to linger in the nave or wander away
among the mysterious aisles; for there is nothing in
this world so fascinating as a Gothic minster, which
always invites you deeper and deeper into its heart
both by vast revelations and shadowy concealments.
Through the open-work screen that divides the nave
from the chancel and choir, we could discern the gleam
of a marvellous window, but were debarred from
entrance into that more sacred precinct of the Abbey
by the vergers. These vigilant officials (doing their
duty all the more strenuously because no fees could be
exacted from Sunday visitors) flourished their staves,
and drove us towards the grand entrance like a flock
of sheep. Lingering through one of the aisles, Ihappened to look down,
and found my foot upon a stone inscribed with this
familiar exclamation, "O rare Ben
Jonson!" and remembered the story of stout
old Ben's burial in that spot, standing
upright,--not, I presume, on account of any unseemly
reluctance on his part to lie down in the dust, like
other men, but because standing-room was all that
could reasonably be demanded for a poet among the
slumberous notabilities of his age. It made me weary
to think of it!--such a prodigious length of time to
keep one's feet!--apart from the honor of the
thing, it would certainly have been better for Ben to
stretch himself at ease in some country churchyard. To
this day, however, I fancy that there is a
contemptuous alloy mixed up with the admiration which
the higher classes of English society profess for
their literary men.

Another day--in truth, many other days--I sought
out Poets' Corner, and found a sign-board and
pointed finger directing the visitor to it, on the
corner house of a little lane leading towards the rear
of the Abbey. The entrance is at the southeastern end
of the south transept, and it is used, on ordinary
occasions, as the only free mode of access to the
building. It is no spacious arch, but a small, lowly
door, passing through which, and pushing aside an
inner screen that partly keeps out an exceedingly
chill wind, you find yourself in a dim nook of the
Abbey, with the busts of poets gazing at you from the
otherwise bare stone-work of the walls. Great poets,
too; for Ben Jonson is right behind the door, and
Spenser's tablet is next, and Butler's on
the same side of the transept, and Milton's
(whose bust you know at once by its resemblance to one
of his portraits, though older, more wrinkled, and
sadder than that) is close by, and a
profile-medallionof
Gray beneath it. A window high aloft sheds down a
dusky daylight on these and many other sculptured
marbles, now as yellow as old parchment, that cover
the three walls of the nook up to an elevation of
about twenty feet above the pavement. It seemed to me
that I had always been familiar with the spot.
Enjoying a humble intimacy--and how much of my life
had else been a dreary solitude!--with many of its
inhabitants, I could not feel myself a stranger there.
It was delightful to be among them. There was a genial
awe, mingled with a sense of kind and friendly
presences about me; and I was glad, moreover, at
finding so many of them there together, in fit
companionship, mutually recognized and duly honored,
all reconciled now, whatever distant generations,
whatever personal hostility or other miserable
impediment, had divided them far asunder while they
lived. I have never felt a similar interest in any
other tombstones, nor have I ever been deeply moved by
the imaginary presence of other famous dead people. A
poet's ghost is the only one that survives for
his fellow-mortals, after his bones are in the
dust,--and he not ghostly, but cherishing many hearts
with his own warmth in the chillest atmosphere of
life. What other fame is worth aspiring for? Or, let
me speak it more boldly, what other long-enduring fame
can exist? We neither remember nor care anything for
the past, except as the poet has made it intelligibly
noble and sublime to our comprehension. The shades of
the mighty have no substance; they flit ineffectually
about the darkened stage where they performed their
momentary parts, save when the poet has thrown his own
creative soul into them, and imparted a more vivid
life than ever they were able to manifest to mankind
while theydwelt in
the body. And therefore--though he cunningly disguises
himself in their armor, their robes of state, or
kingly purple--it is not the statesman, the warrior,
or the monarch that survives, but the despised poet,
whom they may have fed with their crumbs, and to whom
they owe all that they now are or have,--a name!

In the foregoing paragraph I seem to have been
betrayed into a flight above or beyond the customary
level that best agrees with me; but it represents
fairly enough the emotions with which I passed from
Poets' Corner into the chapels, which contain the
sepulchres of kings and great people. They are
magnificent even now, and must have been inconceivably
so when the marble slabs and pillars wore their new
polish, and the statues retained the brilliant colors
with which they were originally painted, and the
shrines their rich gilding, of which the sunlight
still shows a glimmer or a streak, though the sunbeam
itself looks tarnished with antique dust. Yet this
recondite portion of the Abbey presents few memorials
of personages whom we care to remember. The shrine of
Edward the Confessor has a certain interest, because
it was so long held in religious reverence, and
because the very dust that settled upon it was
formerly worth gold. The helmet and war-saddle of
Henry V., worn at Agincourt, and now suspended above
his tomb, are memorable objects, but more for
Shakespeare's sake than the victor's own. Rank
has been the general passport to admission here. Noble
and regal dust is as cheap as dirt under the pavement.
I am glad to recollect, indeed (and it is too
characteristic of the right English spirit not to be
mentioned), one or two gigantic statues of great
mechanicians, who contributed largelyto the material welfare of
England, sitting familiarly in their marble chairs
among forgotten kings and queens. Otherwise, the
quaintness of the earlier monuments, and the antique
beauty of some of them, are what chiefly gives them
value. Nevertheless, Addison is buried among the men
of rank; not on the plea of his literary fame,
however, but because he was connected with nobility by
marriage, and had been a Secretary of State. His
gravestone is inscribed with a resounding verse from
Tickell's lines to his memory, the only lines by
which Tickell himself is now remembered, and which (as
I discovered a little while ago) he mainly filched
from an obscure versifier of somewhat earlier date.

Returning to Poets' Corner, I looked again at
the walls, and wondered how the requisite hospitality
can be shown to poets of our own and the succeeding
ages. There is hardly a foot of space left, although
room has lately been found for a bust of Southey and a
full-length statue of Campbell. At best, only a little
portion of the Abbey is dedicated to poets, literary
men, musical composers, and others of the gentle
artist breed, and even into that small nook of
sanctity men of other pursuits have thought it decent
to intrude themselves. Methinks the tuneful throng,
being at home here, should recollect how they were
treated in their lifetime, and turn the cold shoulder,
looking askance at nobles and official personages,
however worthy of honorable interment elsewhere. Yet
it shows aptly and truly enough what portion of the
world's regard and honor has heretofore been
awarded to literary eminence in comparison with other
modes of greatness,--this dimly lighted corner (nor
even that quietly to themselves) in the vast minster,
the walls of whichare sheathed and hidden under
marble that has been wasted upon the illustrious
obscure. Nevertheless, it may not be worth while to
quarrel with the world on this account; for, to
confess the very truth, their own little nook contains
more than one poet whose memory is kept alive by his
monument, instead of imbuing the senseless stone with
a spiritual immortality,--men of whom you do not ask,
"Where is he?" but, "Why is he
here?" I estimate that all the literary people
who really make an essential part of one's inner
life, including the period since English literature
first existed, might have ample elbow-room to sit down
and quaff their draughts of Castaly round
Chaucer's broad, horizontal tombstone. These
divinest poets consecrate the spot, and throw a
reflected glory over the humblest of their companions.
And as for the latter, it is to be hoped that. they
may have long outgrown the characteristic jealousies
and morbid sensibilities of their craft, and have
found out the little value (probably not amounting to
sixpence in immortal currency) of the posthumous
renown which they once aspired to win. It would be a
poor compliment to a dead poet to fancy him leaning
out of the sky and snuffing up the impure breath of
earthly praise.

Yet we cannot easily rid ourselves of the notion
that those who have bequeathed us the inheritance of
an undying song would fain be conscious of its endless
reverberations in the hearts of mankind, and would
delight, among sublimer enjoyments, to see their names
emblazoned in such a treasure-place of great memories
as Westminster Abbey. There are some men, at all
events,--true and tender poets, moreover, and fully
deserving of the honor,--whose spirits, I feel
certain, would linger a little while about
Poets'Corner,
for the sake of witnessing their own apotheosis among
their kindred. They have had a strong natural
yearning, not so much for applause as sympathy, which
the cold fortune of their lifetime did but scantily
supply; so that this unsatisfied appetite may make
itself felt upon sensibilities at once so delicate and
retentive, even a step or two beyond the grave. Leigh
Hunt, for example, would be pleased, even now, if he
could learn that his bust had been reposited in the
midst of the old poets whom he admired and loved;
though there is hardly a man among the authors of
to-day and yesterday whom the judgment of Englishmen
would be less likely to place there. He deserves it,
however, if not for his verse (the value of which I do
not estimate, never having been able to read it), yet
for his delightful prose, his unmeasured poetry, the
inscrutable happiness of his touch, working soft
miracles by a life-process like the growth of grass
and flowers. As with all such gentle writers, his page
sometimes betrayed a vestige of affectation, but, the
next moment, a rich, natural luxuriance overgrew and
buried it out of sight. I knew him a little, and
(since, Heaven be praised, few English celebrities
whom I chanced to meet have enfranchised my pen by
their decease, and as I assume no liberties with
living men) I will conclude this rambling article by
sketching my first interview with Leigh Hunt.

He was then at Hammersmith, occupying a very plain
and shabby little house, in a contiguous range of
others like it, with no prospect but that of an ugly
village street, and certainly nothing to gratify his
craving for a tasteful environment, inside or out. A
slatternly maid-servant opened the door for us, and he
himself stood in the entry, a beautiful and
venerableold man,
buttoned to the chin in a black dress-coat, tall and
slender, with a countenance quietly alive all over,
and the gentlest and most naturally courteous manner.
He ushered us into his little study, or parlor, or
both,--a very forlorn room, with poor paper-hangings
and carpet, few books, no pictures that I remember,
and an awful lack of upholstery. I touch distinctly
upon these external blemishes and this nudity of
adornment, not that they would be worth mentioning in
a sketch of other remarkable persons, but because
Leigh Hunt was born with such a faculty of enjoying
all beautiful things that it seemed as if Fortune did
him as much wrong in not supplying them as in
withholding a sufficiency of vital breath from
ordinary men. All kinds of mild magnificence, tempered
by his taste, would have become him well; but he had
not the grim dignity that assumes nakedness as the
better robe.

I have said that he was a beautiful old man. In
truth, I never saw a finer countenance, either as to
the mould of features or the expression, nor any that
showed the play of feeling so perfectly without the
slightest theatrical emphasis. It was like a
child's face in this respect. At my first glimpse
of him, when he met us in the entry, I discerned that
he was old, his long hair being white and his wrinkles
many; it was an aged visage, in short, such as I had
not at all expected to see, in spite of dates, because
his books talk to the reader with the tender vivacity
of youth. But when he began to speak, and as he grew
more earnest in conversation, I ceased to be sensible
of his age; sometimes, indeed, its dusky shadow
darkened through the gleam which his sprightly
thoughts diffused about his face, but then another
flash of youthcame
out of his eyes and made an illumination again. I
never witnessed such a wonderfully illusive
transformation, before or since; and, to this day,
trusting only to my recollection, I should find it
difficult to decide which was his genuine and stable
predicament,--youth or age. I have met no Englishman
whose manners seemed to me so agreeable, soft, rather
than polished, wholly unconventional, the natural
growth of a kindly and sensitive disposition without
any reference to rule, or else obedient to some rule
so subtile that the nicest observer could not detect
the application of it.

His eyes were dark and very fine, and his
delightful voice accompanied their visible language
like music. He appeared to be exceedingly appreciative
of whatever was passing among those who surrounded
him, and especially of the vicissitudes in the
consciousness of the person to whom he happened to be
addressing himself at the moment. I felt that no
effect upon my mind of what he uttered, no emotion,
however transitory, in myself, escaped his notice,
though not from any positive vigilance on his part,
but because his faculty of observation was so
penetrative and delicate; and to say the truth, it a
little confused me to discern always a ripple on his
mobile face, responsive to any slightest breeze that
passed over the inner reservoir of my sentiments, and
seemed thence to extend to a similar reservoir within
himself. On matters of feeling, and within a certain
depth, you might spare yourself the trouble of
utterance, because he already knew what you wanted to
say, and perhaps a little more than you would have
spoken. His figure was full of gentle movement,
though, somehow, without disturbing its quietude; and
as he talked, he keptfolding his hands nervously, and
betokened in many ways a fine and immediate
sensibility, quick to feel pleasure or pain, though
scarcely capable, I should imagine, of a passionate
experience in either direction. There was not an
English trait in him from head to foot, morally,
intellectually, or physically. Beef, ale, or stout,
brandy or port-wine, entered not at all into his
composition. In his earlier life, he appears to have
given evidences of courage and sturdy principle, and
of a tendency to fling himself into the rough struggle
of humanity on the liberal side. It would be taking
too much upon myself to affirm that this was merely a
projection of his fancy world into the actual, and
that he never could have hit a downright blow, and was
altogether an unsuitable person to receive one. I
beheld him not in his armor, but in his peacefulest
robes. Nevertheless, drawing my conclusion merely from
what I saw, it would have occurred to me that his main
deficiency was a lack of grit. Though anything but a
timid man, the combative and defensive elements were
not prominently developed in his character, and could
have been made available only when he put an unnatural
force upon his instincts. It was on this account, and
also because of the fineness of his nature generally,
that the English appreciated him no better, and left
this sweet and delicate poet poor, and with scanty
laurels, in his declining age.

It was not, I think, from his American blood that
Leigh Hunt derived either his amiability or his
peaceful inclinations; at least, I do not see how we
can reasonably claim the former quality as a national
characteristic, though the latter might have been
fairly inherited from his ancestors on the
mother'sside,
who were Pennsylvania Quakers. But the kind of
excellence that distinguished him--his fineness,
subtilty, and grace--was that which the richest
cultivation has heretofore tended to develop in the
happier examples of American genius, and which (though
I say it a little reluctantly) is perhaps what our
future intellectual advancement may make general among
us. His person, at all events, was thoroughly
American, and of the best type, as were likewise his
manners; for we are the best as well as the worst
mannered people in the world.

Leigh Hunt loved dearly to be praised. That is to
say, he desired sympathy as a flower seeks sunshine,
and perhaps profited by it as much in the richer depth
of coloring that it imparted to his ideas. In response
to all that we ventured to express about his writings
(and, for my part, I went quite to the extent of my
conscience, which was a long way, and there left the
matter to a lady and a young girl, who happily were
with me), his face shone, and he manifested great
delight, with a perfect, and yet delicate, frankness,
for which I loved him. He could not tell us, he said,
the happiness that such appreciation gave him; it
always took him by surprise, he remarked, for--perhaps
because he cleaned his own boots, and performed other
little ordinary offices for himself--he never had been
conscious of anything wonderful in his own person.
And then he smiled, making himself and all the poor
little parlor about him beautiful thereby. It is
usually the hardest thing in the world to praise a man
to his face; but Leigh Hunt received the incense with
such gracious satisfaction (feeling it to be sympathy,
not vulgar praise), that the only difficulty was to
keep the enthusiasm of the moment within the limit
ofpermanent
opinion. A storm had suddenly come up while we were
talking the rain poured, the lightning flashed, and
the thunder broke; but I hope, and have great pleasure
in believing, that it was a sunny hour for Leigh Hunt.
Nevertheless, it was not to my voice that he most
favorably inclined his ear, but to those of my
companions. Women are the fit ministers at such a
shrine.

He must have suffered keenly in his lifetime, and
enjoyed keenly, keeping his emotions so much upon the
surface as he seemed to do, and convenient for
everybody to play upon. Being of a cheerful
temperament, happiness had probably the upperhand. His
was a light, mildly joyous nature, gentle, graceful,
yet seldom attaining to that deepest grace which
results from power; for beauty, like woman, its human
representative, dallies with the gentle, but yields
its consummate favor only to the strong. I imagine
that Leigh Hunt may have been more beautiful when I
met him, both in person and character, than in his
earlier days. As a young man, I could conceive of his
being finical in certain moods, but not now, when the
gravity of age shed a venerable grace about him. I
rejoiced to hear him say that he was favored with most
confident and cheering anticipations in respect to a
future life; and there were abundant proofs,
throughout our interview, of an unrepining spirit,
resignation, quiet relinquishment of the worldly
benefits that were denied him, thankful enjoyment of
whatever he had to enjoy, and piety, and hope shining
onward into the dusk,--all of which gave a reverential
cast to the feeling with which we parted from him. I
wish that he could have had one full draught of
prosperity before he died. As a matter of artistic
propriety, itwould
have been delightful to see him inhabiting a beautiful
house of his own, in an Italian climate, with all
sorts of elaborate upholstery and minute elegances
about him, and a succession of tender and lovely women
to praise his sweet poetry from morning to night. I
hardly know whether it is my fault, or the effect of a
weakness in Leigh Hunt's character, that I should
be sensible of a regret of this nature, when, at the
same time, I sincerely believe that he has found an
infinity of better things in the world whither he has
gone.

At our leave-taking he grasped me warmly by both
hands, and seemed as much interested in our whole
party as if he had known us for years. All this was
genuine feeling, a quick, luxuriant growth out of his
heart, which was a soil for flower-seeds of rich and
rare varieties, not acorns, but a true heart,
nevertheless. Several years afterwards I met him for
the last time at a London dinner-party, looking sadly
broken down by infirmities; and my final recollection
of the beautiful old man presents him arm in arm with,
nay, if I mistake not, partly embraced and supported
by, another beloved and honored poet, whose
minstrel-name, since he has a week-day one for his
personal occasions, I will venture to speak. It was
Barry Cornwall, whose kind introduction had first made
me known to Leigh Hunt.

OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY.

BECOMING an inhabitant of a great English town, I
often turned aside from the prosperous thoroughfares
(where the edifices, the shops, and the bustling crowd
differed not so much from scenes with which I was
familiar in my own country), and went designedly
astray among precincts that reminded me of some of
Dickens's grimiest pages. There I caught glimpses
of a people and a mode of life that were comparatively
new to my observation, a sort of sombre phantasmagoric
spectacle, exceedingly undelightful to behold, yet
involving a singular interest and even fascination in
its ugliness.

Dirt, one would fancy, is plenty enough all over
the world, being the symbolic accompaniment of the
foul incrustation which began to settle over and bedim
all earthly things as soon as Eve had bitten the
apple; ever since which hapless epoch, her daughters
have chiefly been engaged in a desperate and
unavailing struggle to get rid of it. But the dirt of
a poverty-stricken English street is a monstrosity
unknown on our side of the Atlantic. It reigns supreme
within its own limits, and is inconceivable everywhere
beyond them. We enjoy the great advantage, that the
brightness and dryness of our atmosphere keep
everything clean that the sun shines upon, converting
the larger portion of our impurities into transitory
dust which the next wind can sweep away, in contrast
with the damp, adhesive grime that incorporates itself
with allsurfaces
(unless continually and painfully cleansed) in the
chill moisture of the English air. Then the
all-pervading smoke of the city, abundantly
intermingled with the sable snow-flakes of bituminous
coal, hovering overhead, descending, and alighting on
pavements and rich architectural fronts, on the snowy
muslin of the ladies, and the gentlemen's
starched collars and shirt-bosoms, invests even the
better streets in a half-mourning garb. It is beyond
the resources of Wealth to keep the smut away from its
premises or its own fingers' ends; and as for
Poverty, it surrenders itself to the dark influence
without a struggle. Along with disastrous
circumstances, pinching need, adversity so lengthened
out as to constitute the rule of life, there comes a
certain chill depression of the spirits which seems
especially to shudder at cold water. In view of so
wretched a state of things, we accept the ancient
Deluge not merely as an insulated phenomenon, but as a
periodical necessity, and acknowledge that nothing
less than such a general washing-day could suffice to
cleanse the slovenly old world of its moral and
material dirt.

Gin-shops, or what the English call spirit-vaults,
are numerous in the vicinity of these poor streets,
and are set off with the magnificence of gilded
door-posts, tarnished by contact with the unclean
customers who haunt there. Ragged children come
thither with old shaving-mugs, or broken-nosed
teapots, or any such makeshift receptacle, to get a
little poison or madness for their parents, who
deserve no better requital at their hands for having
engendered them. Inconceivably sluttish women enter at
noonday and stand at the counter among boon-companions
of both sexes, stirring up misery and jollity in a
bumper together, andquaffing off the mixture with a
relish. As for the men, they lounge there continually,
drinking till they are drunken,--drinking as long as
they have a half-penny left, and then, as it seemed to
me, waiting for a sixpenny miracle to be wrought in
their pockets so as to enable them to be drunken
again. Most of these establishments have a significant
advertisement of "Beds," doubtless for the
accommodation of their customers in the interval
between one intoxication and the next. I never could
find it in my heart, however, utterly to condemn these
sad revellers, and should certainly wait till I had
some better consolation to offer before depriving them
of their dram of gin, though death itself were in the
glass; for methought their poor souls needed such
fiery stimulant to lift them a little way out of the
smothering squalor of both their outward and interior
life, giving them glimpses and suggestions, even if
bewildering ones, of a spiritual existence that
limited their present misery. The temperance-reformers
unquestionably derive their commission from the Divine
Beneficence, but have never been taken fully into its
counsels. All may not be lost, though those good men
fail.

Pawnbrokers' establishments, distinguished by
the mystic symbol of the three golden balls, were
conveniently accessible; though what personal property
these wretched people could possess, capable of being
estimated in silver or copper, so as to afford a basis
for a loan, was a problem that still perplexes me. Old
clothesmen, likewise, dwelt hard by, and hung out
ancient garments to dangle in the wind. There were
butchers' shops, too, of a class adapted to the
neighborhood, presenting no such generously fattened
carcasses as Englishmen love to gaze at in the
market,no
stupendous halves of mighty beeves, no dead hogs, or
muttons ornamented with carved bas-reliefs of fat on
their ribs and shoulders, in a peculiarly British
style of art,--not these, but bits and gobbets of lean
meat, selvages snipt off from steaks, tough and
stringy morsels, bare bones smitten away from joints
by the cleaver; tripe, liver, bullocks' feet, or
whatever else was cheapest and divisible into the
smallest lots. I am afraid that even such delicacies
came to many of their tables hardly oftener than
Christmas. In the windows of other little shops you
saw half a dozen wizened herrings; some eggs in a
basket, looking so dingily antique that your
imagination smelt them; fly-speckled biscuits,
segments of a hungry cheese, pipes and papers of
tobacco. Now and then a sturdy milk-woman passed by
with a wooden yoke over her shoulders, supporting a
pail on either side, filled with a whitish fluid, the
composition of which was water and chalk and the milk
of a sickly cow, who gave the best she had, poor
thing! but could scarcely make it rich or wholesome,
spending her life in some close city-nook and
pasturing on strange food. I have seen, once or twice,
a donkey coming into one of these streets with
panniers full of vegetables, and departing with a
return cargo of what looked like rubbish and
street-sweepings. No other commerce seemed to exist,
except, possibly, a girl might offer you a pair of
stockings or a worked collar, or a man whisper
something mysterious about wonderfully cheap cigars.
And yet I remember seeing female hucksters in those
regions, with their wares on the edge of the sidewalk
and their own seats right in the carriage-way,
pretending to sell half-decayed oranges and apples,
toffy, Ormskirk cakes, combs, and cheap jewelry, the
coarsest kind of crockery, and littleplates of oysters,--knitting
patiently all day long, and removing their
undiminished stock in trade at nightfall. All
indispensable importations from other quarters of the
town were on a remarkably diminutive scale: for
example, the wealthier inhabitants purchased their
coal by the wheelbarrow-load, and the poorer ones by
the peck-measure. It was a curious and melancholy
spectacle, when an overladen coal-cart happened to
pass through the street and drop a handful or two of
its burden in the mud, to see half a dozen women and
children scrambling for the treasure-trove, like a
flock of hens and chickens gobbling up some spilt
corn. In this connection I may as well mention a
commodity of boiled snails (for such they appeared to
me, though probably a marine production) which used to
be peddled from door to door, piping hot, as an
article of cheap nutriment.

The population of these dismal abodes appeared to
consider the sidewalks and middle of the street as
their common hall. In a drama of low life, the unity
of place might be arranged rigidly according to the
classic rule, and the street be the one locality in
which every scene and incident should occur.
Courtship, quarrels, plot and counterplot,
conspiracies for robbery and murder, family
difficulties or agreements,--all such matters, I doubt
not, are constantly discussed or transacted in this
sky-roofed saloon, so regally hung with its sombre
canopy of coal-smoke. Whatever the disadvantages of
the English climate, the only comfortable or wholesome
part of life, for the city poor, must be spent in the
open air. The stifled and squalid rooms where they lie
down at night, whole families and neighborhoods
together, or sulkily elbow one another in the daytime,
when a settled rain drivesthem within doors, are worse
horrors than it is worth while (without a practical
object in view) to admit into one's imagination.
No wonder that they creep forth from the foul mystery
of their interiors, stumble down from their garrets,
or scramble up out of their cellars, on the upper step
of which you may see the grimy housewife, before the
shower is ended, letting the raindrops gutter down her
visage; while her children (an impish progeny of
cavernous recesses below the common sphere of
humanity) swarm into the daylight and attain all that
they know of personal purification in the nearest
mud-puddle. It might almost make a man doubt the
existence of his own soul, to observe how Nature has
flung these little wretches into the street and left
them there, so evidently regarding them as nothing
worth, and how all mankind acquiesce in the great
mother's estimate of her offspring. For, if they
are to have no immortality, what superior claim can I
assert for mine? And how difficult to believe that
anything so precious as a germ of immortal growth can
have been buried under this dirt-heap, plunged into
this cesspool of misery and vice! As often as I
beheld the scene, it affected me with surprise and
loathsome interest, much resembling, though in a far
intenser degree, the feeling with which, when a boy, I
used to turn over a plank or an old log that had long
lain on the damp ground, and found a vivacious
multitude of unclean and devilish-looking insects
scampering to and fro beneath it. Without an infinite
faith, there seemed as much prospect of a blessed
futurity for those hideous bugs and many-footed worms
as for these brethren of our humanity and co-heirs of
all our heavenly inheritance. Ah, what a mystery!
Slowly, slowly, as after groping atthe bottom of a deep, noisome,
stagnant pool, my hope struggles upward to the
surface, bearing the half-drowned body of a child
along with it, and heaving it aloft for its life, and
my own life, and all our lives. Unless these
slime-clogged nostrils can be made capable of inhaling
celestial air, I know not how the purest and most
intellectual of us can reasonably expect ever to taste
a breath of it. The whole question of eternity is
staked there. If a single one of those helpless little
ones be lost, the world is lost!

The women and children greatly preponderate in such
places; the men probably wandering abroad in quest of
that daily miracle, a dinner and a drink, or perhaps
slumbering in the daylight that they may the better
follow out their cat-like rambles through the dark.
Here are women with young figures, but old, wrinkled,
yellow faces, tanned and blear-eyed with the smoke
which they cannot spare from their scanty fires,--it
being too precious for its warmth to be swallowed by
the chimney. Some of them sit on the doorsteps,
nursing their unwashed babies at bosoms which we will
glance aside from, for the sake of our mothers and all
womanhood, because the fairest spectacle is here the
foulest. Yet motherhood, in these dark abodes, is
strangely identical with what we have all known it to
be in the happiest homes. Nothing, as I remember,
smote me with more grief and pity (all the more
poignant because perplexingly entangled with an
inclination to smile) than to hear a gaunt and ragged
mother priding herself on the pretty ways of her
ragged and skinny infant, just as a young matron
might, when she invites her lady friends to admire her
plump, white-robed darling in the nursery. Indeed, no
womanly characteristic seemed to have altogether
perished outof
these poor souls. It was the very same creature whose
tender torments make the rapture of our young days,
whom we love, cherish, and protect, and rely upon in
life and death, and whom we delight to see beautify
her beauty with rich robes and set it off with jewels,
though now fantastically masquerading in a garb of
tatters, wholly unfit for her to handle. I recognized
her, over and over again, in the groups round a
doorstep or in the descent of a cellar, chatting with
prodigious earnestness about intangible trifles,
laughing for a little jest, sympathizing, at almost
the same instant with one neighbor's sunshine and
another's shadow; wise, simple, sly, and patient,
yet easily perturbed, and breaking into small feminine
ebullitions of spite, wrath, and jealousy, tornadoes
of a moment, such as vary the social atmosphere of her
silken-skirted sisters, though smothered into
propriety by dint of a well-bred habit. Not that there
was an absolute deficiency of good-breeding, even
here. It often surprised me to witness a courtesy and
deference among these ragged folks, which, having seen
it, I did not thoroughly believe in, wondering whence
it should have come. I am persuaded, however, that
there were laws of intercourse which they never
violated,--a code of the cellar, the garret, the
common staircase, the doorstep, and the pavement,
which perhaps had as deep a foundation in natural
fitness as the code of the drawing-room.

Yet again I doubt whether I may not have been
uttering folly in the last two sentences, when I
reflect how rude and rough these specimens of feminine
character generally were. They had a readiness with
their hands that reminded me of Molly Seagrim and
other heroines in Fielding's novels. For example,
I haveseen a woman
meet a man in the street, and, for no reason
perceptible to me, suddenly clutch him by the hair and
cuff his ears,--an infliction which he bore with
exemplary patience, only snatching the very earliest
opportunity to take to his heels. Where a sharp tongue
will not serve the purpose, they trust to the
sharpness of their finger-nails, or incarnate a whole
vocabulary of vituperative words in a resounding slap,
or the downright blow of a doubled fist. All English
people, I imagine, are influenced in a far greater
degree than ourselves by this simple and honest
tendency, in cases of disagreement, to batter one
another's persons; and whoever has seen a crowd of
English ladies (for instance, at the door of the
Sistine Chapel, in Holy Week) will be satisfied that
their belligerent propensities are kept in abeyance
only by a merciless rigor on the part of society. It
requires a vast deal of refinement to spiritualize
their large physical endowments. Such being the case
with the delicate ornaments of the drawing-room, it is
less to be wondered at that women who live mostly in
the open air, amid the coarsest kind of companionship
and occupation, should carry on the intercourse of
life with a freedom unknown to any class of American
females, though still, I am resolved to think,
compatible with a generous breadth of natural
propriety. It shocked me, at first, to see them (of
all ages, even elderly, as well as infants that could
just toddle across the street alone) going about in
the mud and mire, or through the dusky snow and slosh
of a severe week in winter, with petticoats high
uplifted above bare, red feet and legs but I was
comforted by observing that both shoes and stockings
generally reappeared with better weather, having been
thriftily kept out of the damp for theconvenience of dry feet within
doors. Their hardihood was wonderful, and their
strength greater than could have been expected from
such spare diet as they probably lived upon. I have
seen them carrying on their heads great burdens under
which they walked as freely as if they were
fashionable bonnets; or sometimes the burden was huge
enough almost to cover the whole person, looked at
from behind,--as in Tuscan villages you may see the
girls coming in from the country with great bundles of
green twigs upon their backs, so that they resemble
locomotive masses of verdure and fragrance. But these
poor English women seemed to be laden with rubbish,
incongruous and indescribable, such as bones and rags,
the sweepings of the house and of the street, a
merchandise gathered up from what poverty itself had
thrown away, a heap of filthy stuff analogous to
Christian's bundle of sin.

Sometimes, though very seldom, I detected a certain
gracefulness among the younger women that was
altogether new to my observation. It was a charm
proper to the lowest class. One girl I particularly
remember, in a garb none of the cleanest and nowise
smart, and herself exceedingly coarse in all respects,
but yet endowed with a sort of witchery, a native
charm, a robe of simple beauty and suitable behavior
that she was born in and bad never been tempted to
throw off, because she had really nothing else to put
on. Eve herself could not have been more natural.
Nothing was affected, nothing imitated; no proper
grace was vulgarized by an effort to assume the
manners or adornments of another sphere. This kind of
beauty, arrayed in a fitness of its own, is probably
vanishing out of the world, and will certainly never
be found in America, where all the girls, whether
daughters of theupper-tendom, the mediocrity, the
cottage, or the kennel, aim at one standard of dress
and deportment, seldom accomplishing a perfectly
triumphant hit or an utterly absurd failure. Those
words, "genteel" and "ladylike,"
are terrible ones, and do us infinite mischief, but it
is because (at least, I hope so) we are in a
transition state, and shall emerge into a higher mode
of simplicity than has ever been known to past ages.

In such disastrous circumstances as I have been
attempting to describe, it was beautiful to observe
what a mysterious efficacy still asserted itself in
character. A woman, evidently poor as the poorest of
her neighbors, would be knitting or sewing on the
doorstep, just as fifty other women were; but round
about her skirts (though wofully patched) you would be
sensible of a certain sphere of decency, which, it
seemed to me, could not have been kept more
impregnable in the cosiest little sitting-room, where
the teakettle on the hob was humming its good old song
of domestic peace. Maidenhood had a similar power.
The evil habit that grows upon us in this harsh world
makes me faithless to my own better perceptions; and
yet I have seen girls in these wretched streets, on
whose virgin purity, judging merely from their
impression on my instincts as they passed by, I should
have deemed it safe, at the moment, to stake my life.
The next moment, however, as the surrounding flood of
moral uncleanness surged over their footsteps, I would
not have staked a spike of thistle-down on the same
wager. Yet the miracle was within the scope of
Providence, which is equally wise and equally
beneficent (even to those poor girls, though I
acknowledge the fact without the remotest
comprehension of the mode of it), whether they were
pure or what we fellow-sinners call vile. Unlessyour faith be
deep-rooted and of most vigorous growth, it is the
safer way not to turn aside into this region so
suggestive of miserable doubt. It was a place
"with dreadful faces thronged," wrinkled and
grim with vice and wretchedness; and, thinking over
the line of Milton here quoted, I come to the
conclusion that those ugly lineaments which startled
Adam and Eve, as they looked backward to the closed
gate of Paradise, were no fiends from the pit, but the
more terrible foreshadowings of what so many of their
descendants were to be. God help them, and us
likewise, their brethren and sisters! Let me add,
that, forlorn, ragged, careworn, hopeless, dirty,
haggard, hungry, as they were, the most pitiful thing
of all was to see the sort of patience with which they
accepted their lot, as if they had been born into the
world for that and nothing else. Even the little
children had this characteristic in as perfect
development as their grandmothers.

The children, in truth, were the ill-omened
blossoms from which another harvest of precisely such
dark fruitage as I saw ripened around me was to be
produced. Of course you would imagine these to be
lumps of crude iniquity, tiny vessels as full as they
could hold of naughtiness; nor can I say a great deal
to the contrary. Small proof of parental discipline
could I discern, save when a mother (drunken, I
sincerely hope) snatched her own imp out of a group of
pale, half-naked, humor-eaten abortions that were
playing and squabbling together in the mud, turned up
its tatters, brought down her heavy hand on its poor
little tenderest part, and let it go again with a
shake. If the child knew what the punishment was for,
it was wiser than I pretend to be. It yelled and went
back to its playmates in the mud. Yet let me beartestimony to what was
beautiful, and more touching than anything that I ever
witnessed before in the intercourse of happier
children. I allude to the superintendence which some
of these small people (too small, one would think, to
be sent into the street alone, had there been any
other nursery for them) exercised over still smaller
ones. Whence they derived such a sense of duty, unless
immediately from God, I cannot tell; but it was
wonderful to observe the expression of responsibility
in their deportment, the anxious fidelity with which
they discharged their unfit office, the tender
patience with which they linked their less pliable
impulses to the wayward footsteps of an infant, and
let it guide them whithersoever it liked. In the
hollow-cheeked, large-eyed girl of ten, whom I saw
giving a cheerless oversight to her baby-brother, I
did not so much marvel at it. She had merely come a
little earlier than usual to the perception of what
was to be her business in life. But I admired the
sickly-looking little boy, who did violence to his
boyish nature by making himself the servant of his
little sister,--she too small to walk, and he too
small to take her in his arms,--and therefore working
a kind of miracle to transport her from one dirtheap
to another. Beholding such works of love and duty, I
took heart again, and deemed it not so impossible,
after all, for these neglected children to find a path
through the squalor and evil of their circumstances up
to the gate of heaven. Perhaps there was this latent
good in all of them, though generally they looked
brutish, and dull even in their sports; there was
little mirth among them, nor even a fully awakened
spirit of blackguardism. Yet sometimes, again, I saw,
with surprise and a sense as if I had been asleep and
dreaming, thebright, intelligent, merry face of
a child whose dark eyes gleamed with vivacious
expression through the dirt that incrusted its skin,
like sunshine struggling through a very dusty
window-pane.

In these streets the belted and blue-coated
policeman appears seldom in comparison with the
frequency of his occurrence in more reputable
thoroughfares. I used to think that the inhabitants
would have ample time to murder one another, or any
stranger, like myself, who might violate the filthy
sanctities of the place, before the law could bring up
its lumbering assistance. Nevertheless, there is a
supervision; nor does the watchfulness of authority
permit the populace to be tempted to any outbreak.
Once, in a time of dearth, I noticed a ballad-singer
going through the street hoarsely chanting some
discordant strain in a provincial dialect, of which I
could only make out that it addressed the
sensibilities of the auditors on the score of
starvation; but by his side stalked the policeman,
offering no interference, but watchful to hear what
this rough minstrel said or sang, and silence him, if
his effusion threatened to prove too soul-stirring.
In my judgment, however, there is little or no danger
of that kind: they starve patiently, sicken patiently,
die patiently, not through resignation, but a diseased
flaccidity of hope. If ever they should do mischief to
those above them, it will probably be by the
communication of some destructive pestilence; for, so
the medical men affirm, they suffer all the ordinary
diseases with a degree of virulence elsewhere unknown,
and keep among themselves traditionary plagues that
have long ceased to afflict more fortunate societies.
Charity herself gathers her robe about her to avoid
their contact. It would be a dire revenge, indeed, if
theywere to prove
their claims to be reckoned of one blood and nature
with the noblest and wealthiest by compelling them to
inhale death through the diffusion of their own
poverty-poisoned atmosphere.

A true Englishman is a kind man at heart, but has
an unconquerable dislike to poverty and beggary.
Beggars have heretofore been so strange to an American
that he is apt to become their prey, being recognized
through his national peculiarities, and beset by them
in the streets. The English smile at him, and say that
there are ample public arrangements for every
pauper's possible need, that street charity
promotes idleness and vice, and that yonder
personification of misery on the pavement will lay up
a good day's profit, besides supping more
luxuriously than the dupe who gives him a shilling. By
and by the stranger adopts their theory and begins to
practise upon it, much to his own temporary freedom
from annoyance, but not entirely without moral
detriment or sometimes a too late contrition. Years
afterwards, it may be, his memory is still haunted by
some vindictive wretch whose cheeks were pale and
hunger-pinched, whose rags fluttered in the east-wind,
whose right arm was paralyzed and his left leg
shrivelled into a mere nerveless stick, but whom he
passed by remorselessly because an Englishman chose to
say that the fellow's misery looked too perfect,
was too artistically got up, to be genuine. Even
allowing this to be true (as, a hundred chances to
one, it was), it would still have been a clear case of
economy to buy him off with a little loose silver, so
that his lamentable figure should not limp at the
heels of your conscience all over the world. To own
the truth, I provided myself with several such
imaginary persecutors in England,and recruited their number with at
least one sickly-looking wretch whose acquaintance I
first made at Assisi, in Italy, and, taking a dislike
to something sinister in his aspect, permitted him to
beg early and late, and all day long, without getting
a single baiocco. At my latest glimpse of him, the
villain avenged himself, not by a volley of horrible
curses as any other Italian beggar would, but by
taking an expression so grief-stricken want-wrung,
hopeless, and withal resigned, that I could paint his
lifelike portrait at this moment. Were I to go over
the same ground again, I would listen to no man's
theories, but buy the little luxury of beneficence at
a cheap rate, instead of doing myself a moral mischief
by exuding a stony incrustation over whatever natural
sensibility I might possess.

On the other hand, there were some mendicants whose
utmost efforts I even now felicitate myself on having
withstood. Such was a phenomenon abridged of his lower
half, who beset me for two or three years together,
and, in spite of his deficiency of locomotive members,
had some supernatural method of transporting himself
(simultaneously, I believe) to all quarters of the
city. He wore a sailor's jacket (possibly,
because skirts would have been a superfluity to his
figure), and had a remarkably broad-shouldered and
muscular frame, surmounted by a large, fresh-colored
face, which was full of power and intelligence. His
dress and linen were the perfection of neatness. Once
a day, at least, wherever I went, I suddenly became
aware of this trunk of a man on the path before me,
resting on his base, and looking as if he had just
sprouted out of the pavement, and would sink into it
again and reappear at some other spot the instant you
left him behind. The expression of his eye wasperfectly respectful,
but terribly fixed, holding your own as by
fascination, never once winking, never wavering from
its point-blank gaze right into your face, till you
were completely beyond the range of his battery of one
immense rifled cannon. This was his mode of soliciting
alms; and he reminded me of the old beggar who
appealed so touchingly to the charitable sympathies of
Gil Blas, taking aim at him from the roadside with a
long-barrelled musket. The intentness and directness
of his silent appeal, his close and unrelenting attack
upon your individuality, respectful as it seemed, was
the very flower of insolence; or, if you give it a
possibly truer interpretation, it was the tyrannical
effort of a man endowed with great natural force of
character to constrain your reluctant will to his
purpose. Apparently, he had staked his salvation upon
the ultimate success of a daily struggle between
himself and me, the triumph of which would compel me
to become a tributary to the hat that lay on the
pavement beside him. Man or fiend, however, there was
a stubbornness in his intended victim which this
massive fragment of a mighty personality had not
altogether reckoned upon, and by its aid I was enabled
to pass him at my customary pace hundreds of times
over, quietly meeting his terribly respectful eye, and
allowing him the fair chance which I felt to be his
due, to subjugate me, if he really had the strength
for it. He never succeeded, but, on the other hand,
never gave up the contest; and should I ever walk
those streets again, I am certain that the truncated
tyrant will sprout up through the pavement and look me
fixedly in the eye, and perhaps get the victory.

I should think all the more highly of myself, if I
had shown equal heroism in resisting another class
ofbeggarly
depredators, who assailed me on my weaker side and won
an easy spoil. Such was the sanctimonious clergyman,
with his white cravat, who visited me with a
subscription-paper, which he himself had drawn up, in
a case of heart-rending distress;--the respectable and
ruined tradesman, going from door to door, shy and
silent in his own person, but accompanied by a
sympathizing friend, who bore testimony to his
integrity, and stated the unavoidable misfortunes that
had crushed him down;--or the delicate and prettily
dressed lady, who had been bred in affluence, but was
suddenly thrown upon the perilous charities of the
world by the death of an indulgent, but secretly
insolvent father, or the commercial catastrophe and
simultaneous suicide of the best of husbands;--or the
gifted, but unsuccessful author, appealing to my
fraternal sympathies, generously rejoicing in some
small prosperities which he was kind enough to term my
own triumphs in the field of letters, and claiming to
have largely contributed to them by his unbought
notices in the public journals. England is full of
such people, and a hundred other varieties of
peripatetic tricksters, higher than these, and lower,
who act their parts tolerably well, but seldom with an
absolutely illusive effect. I knew at once, raw Yankee
as I was, that they were humbugs, almost without an
exception,--rats that nibble at the honest bread and
cheese of the community, and grow fat by their petty
pilferings,--yet often gave them what they asked, and
privately owned myself a simpleton. There is a decorum
which restrains you (unless you happen to be a
police-constable) from breaking through a crust of
plausible respectability, even when you are certain
that there is a knave beneath it.

After making myself as familiar as I decently could
with the poor streets, I became curious to see what
kind of a home was provided for the inhabitants at the
public expense, fearing that it must needs be a most
comfortless one, or else their choice (if choice it
were) of so miserable a life outside was truly
difficult to account for. Accordingly, I visited a
great alms-house, and was glad to observe how
unexceptionably all the parts of the establishment
were carried on, and what an orderly life, full-fed,
sufficiently reposeful, and undisturbed by the
arbitrary exercise of authority, seemed to be led
there. Possibly, indeed, it was that very orderliness,
and the cruel necessity of being neat and clean, and
even the comfort resulting from these and other
Christian-like restraints and regulations, that
constituted the principal grievance on the part of the
poor, shiftless inmates, accustomed to a life-long
luxury of dirt and harum-scarumness. The wild life of
the streets has perhaps as unforgetable a charm, to
those who have once thoroughly imbibed it, as the life
of the forest or the prairie. But I conceive rather
that there must be insuperable difficulties, for the
majority of the poor, in the way of getting admittance
to the almshouse, than that a merely æsthetic
preference for the street would incline the pauper
class to fare scantily and precariously, and expose
their raggedness to the rain and snow, when such a
hospitable door stood wide open for their entrance. It
might be that the roughest and darkest side of the
matter was not shown me, there being persons of
eminent station and of both sexes in the party which I
accompanied; and, of course, a properly trained
public functionary would have deemed it a monstrous
rudeness, as well as a great shame, to exhibit
anything to people of rank that might too painfully
shock their sensibilities.

The women's ward was the portion of the
establishment which we especially examined. It could
not be questioned that they were treated with kindness
as well as care. No doubt, as has been already
suggested, some of them felt the irksomeness of
submission to general rules of orderly behavior, after
being accustomed to that perfect freedom from the
minor proprieties, at least, which is one of the
compensations of absolutely hopeless poverty, or of
any circumstances that set us fairly below the
decencies of life. I asked the governor of the house
whether he met with any difficulty in keeping peace
and order among his inmates; and he informed me that
his troubles among the women were incomparably greater
than with the men. They were freakish, and apt to be
quarrelsome, inclined to plague and pester one another
in ways that it was impossible to lay hold of, and to
thwart his own authority by the like intangible
methods. He said this with the utmost good-nature, and
quite won my regard by so placidly resigning himself
to the inevitable necessity of letting the women throw
dust into his eyes. They certainly looked peaceable
and sisterly enough as I saw them, though still it
might be faintly perceptible that some of them were
consciously playing their parts before the governor
and his distinguished visitors.

This governor seemed to me a man thoroughly fit for
his position. An American, in an office of similar
responsibility, would doubtless be a much superior
person, better educated, possessing a far wider range
of thought, more naturally acute, with a quicker tact
of external observation and a readier faculty of
dealing with difficult cases. The women would not
succeed in throwing half so much dust into his eyes.Moreover, his black
coat, and thin, sallow visage, would make him look
like a scholar, and his manners would indefinitely
approximate to those of a gentleman. But I cannot help
questioning whether, on the whole, these higher
endowments would produce decidedly better results. The
Englishman was thoroughly plebeian both in aspect and
behavior, a bluff, ruddy-faced, hearty, kindly,
yeoman-like personage, with no refinement whatever,
nor any superfluous sensibility, but gifted with a
native wholesomeness of character which must have been
a very beneficial element in the atmosphere of the
almshouse. He spoke to his pauper family in loud,
good-humored, cheerful tones, and treated them with a
healthy freedom that probably caused the forlorn
wretches to feel as if they were free and healthy
likewise. If he had understood them a little better,
he would not have treated them half so wisely. We are
apt to make sickly people more morbid, and unfortunate
people more miserable, by endeavoring to adapt our
deportment to their especial and individual needs.
They eagerly accept our well-meant efforts; but it is
like returning their own sick breath back upon
themselves, to be breathed over and over again,
intensifying the inward mischief at every reception.
The sympathy that would really do them good is of a
kind that recognizes their sound and healthy parts,
and ignores the part affected by disease, which will
thrive under the eye of a too close observer like a
poisonous weed in the sunshine. My good friend the
governor had no tendencies in the latter direction,
and abundance of them in the former, and was
consequently as wholesome and invigorating as the
west-wind with a little spice of the north in it,
brightening the dreary visages that encountered us
asif he had carried
a sunbeam in his hand. He expressed himself by his
whole being and personality, and by works more than
words, and had the not unusual English merit of
knowing what to do much better than how to talk about
it.

The women, I imagine, must have felt one
imperfection in their state, however comfortable
otherwise. They were forbidden, or, at all events,
lacked the means, to follow out their natural instinct
of adorning themselves; all were well dressed in one
homely uniform of blue-checked gowns, with such caps
upon their heads as English servants wear. Generally,
too, they had one dowdy English aspect, and a vulgar
type of features so nearly alike that they seemed
literally to constitute a sisterhood. We have few of
these absolutely unilluminated faces among our native
American population, individuals of whom must be
singularly unfortunate, if, mixing as we do, no drop
of gentle blood has contributed to refine the turbid
element, no gleam of hereditary intelligence has
lighted up the stolid eyes, which their forefathers
brought from the Old Country. Even in this English
almshouse, however, there was at least one person who
claimed to be intimately connected with rank and
wealth. The governor, after suggesting that this
person would probably be gratified by our visit,
ushered us into a small parlor, which was furnished a
little more like a room in a private dwelling than
others that we entered, and had a row of religious
books and fashionable novels on the mantel-piece. An
old lady sat at a bright coal-fire, reading a romance,
and rose to receive us with a certain pomp of manner
and elaborate display of ceremonious courtesy, which,
in spite of myself, made me inwardly question the
genuineness of her aristocraticpretensions. But, at any rate, she
looked like a respectable old soul, and was evidently
gladdened to the very core of her frost-bitten heart
by the awful punctiliousness with which we responded
to her gracious and hospitable, though unfamiliar
welcome. After a little polite conversation, we
retired; and the governor, with a lowered voice and an
air of deference, told us that she had been a lady of
quality, and had ridden in her own equipage, not many
years before, and now lived in continual expectation
that some of her rich relatives would drive up in
their carriages to take her away. Meanwhile, he added,
she was treated with great respect by her
fellow-paupers. I could not help thinking, from a few
criticisable peculiarities in her talk and manner,
that there might have been a mistake on the
governor's part, and perhaps a venial
exaggeration on the old lady's, concerning her former
position in society; but what struck me was the
forcible instance of that most prevalent of English
vanities, the pretension to aristocratic connection,
on one side, and the submission and reverence with
which it was accepted by the governor and his
household, on the other. Among ourselves, I think,
when wealth and eminent position have taken their
departure, they seldom leave a pallid ghost behind
them,--or, if it sometimes stalks abroad, few
recognize it.

We went into several other rooms, at the doors of
which, pausing on the outside, we could hear the
volubility, and sometimes the wrangling, of the female
inhabitants within, but invariably found silence and
peace when we stepped over the threshold. The women
were grouped together in their sitting-rooms,
sometimes three or four, sometimes a larger number,
classified by their spontaneous affinities, I
suppose,and all
busied, so far as I can remember, with the one
occupation of knitting coarse yarn stockings. Hardly
any of them, I am sorry to say, had a brisk or
cheerful air, though it often stirred them up to a
momentary vivacity to be accosted by the governor, and
they seemed to like being noticed, however slightly,
by the visitors. The happiest person whom I saw there
(and running hastily through my experiences, I hardly
recollect to have seen a happier one in my life, if
you take a careless flow of spirits as happiness) was
an old woman that lay in bed among ten or twelve
heavy-looking females, who plied their knitting-work
round about her. She laughed, when we entered, and
immediately began to talk to us, in a thin, little,
spirited quaver, claiming to be more than a century
old; and the governor (in whatever way he happened to
be cognizant of the fact) confirmed her age to be a
hundred and four. Her jauntiness and cackling
merriment were really wonderful. It was as if she had
got through with all her actual business in life two
or three generations ago, and now, freed from every
responsibility for herself or others, had only to keep
up a mirthful state of mind till the short time, or
long time (and, happy as she was, she appeared not to
care whether it were long or short), before Death, who
had misplaced her name in his list, might remember to
take her away. She had gone quite round the circle of
human existence, and come back to the play-ground
again. And so she had grown to be a kind of miraculous
old pet, the plaything of people seventy or eighty
years younger than herself, who talked and laughed
with her as if she were a child, finding great delight
in her wayward and strangely playful responses, into
some of which she cunningly conveyeda gibe that caused their ears to
tingle a little. She had done getting out of bed in
this world, and lay there to be waited upon like a
queen or a baby.

In the same room sat a pauper who had once been an
actress of considerable repute, but was compelled to
give up her profession by a softening of the brain.
The disease seemed to have stolen the continuity out
of her life, and disturbed all healthy relationship
between the thoughts within her and the world without.
On our first entrance, she looked cheerfully at us,
and showed herself ready to engage in conversation;
but suddenly, while we were talking with the
century-old crone, the poor actress began to weep,
contorting her face with extravagant stage-grimaces,
and wringing her hands for some inscrutable sorrow. It
might have been a reminiscence of actual calamity in
her past life, or, quite as probably, it was but a
dramatic woe, beneath which she had staggered and
shrieked and wrung her hands with hundreds of
repetitions in the sight of crowded theatres, and been
as often comforted by thunders of applause. But my
idea of the mystery was, that she had a sense of wrong
in seeing the aged woman (whose empty vivacity was
like the rattling of dry peas in a bladder) chosen as
the central object of interest to the visitors, while
she herself, who had agitated thousands of hearts with
a breath, sat starving for the admiration that was her
natural food. I appeal to the whole society of artists
of the Beautiful and the Imaginative,--poets,
romancers, painters, sculptors, actors,--whether or no
this is a grief that may be felt even amid the torpor
of a dissolving brain!

We looked into a good many sleeping-chambers, where
were rows of beds, mostly calculated for twooccupants, and
provided with sheets and pillow-cases that resembled
sackcloth. It appeared to me that the sense of beauty
was insufficiently regarded in all the arrangements of
the almshouse; a little cheap luxury for the eye, at
least, might do the poor folks a substantial good.
But, at all events, there was the beauty of perfect
neatness and orderliness, which, being heretofore
known to few of them, was perhaps as much as they
could well digest in the remnant of their lives. We
were invited into the laundry, where a great washing
and drying were in process, the whole atmosphere being
hot and vaporous with the steam of wet garments and
bedclothes. This atmosphere was the pauper-life of the
past week or fortnight resolved into a gaseous state,
and breathing it, however fastidiously, we were forced
to inhale the strange element into our inmost being.
Had the Queen been there, I know not how she could
have escaped the necessity. What an intimate
brotherhood is this in which we dwell, do what we may
to put an artificial remoteness between the high
creature and the low one! A poor man's breath, borne
on the vehicle of tobacco-smoke, floats into a
palace-window and reaches the nostrils of a monarch.
It is but an example, obvious to the sense, of the
innumerable and secret channels by which, at every
moment of our lives, the flow and reflux of a common
humanity pervade us all. How superficial are the
niceties of such as pretend to keep aloof! Let the
whole world be cleansed, or not a man or woman of us
all can be clean.

By and by we came to the ward where the children
were kept, on entering which, we saw, in the first
place, several unlovely and unwholesome little people
lazily playing together in a courtyard. And here asingular incommodity
befell one member of our party. Among the children
was a wretched, pale, half-torpid little thing (about
six years old, perhaps, but I know not whether a girl
or a boy), with a humor in its eyes and face, which
the governor said was the scurvy, and which appeared
to bedim its powers of vision, so that it toddied
about gropingly, as if in quest of it did not
precisely know what. This child--this sickly,
wretched, humor-eaten infant, the offspring of
unspeakable sin and sorrow, whom it must have required
several generations of guilty progenitors to render so
pitiable an object as we beheld it--immediately took
an unaccountable fancy to the gentleman just hinted
at. It prowled about him like a pet kitten, rubbing
against his legs, following everywhere at his heels,
pulling at his coat-tails, and, at last, exerting all
the speed that its poor limbs were capable of, got
directly before him and held forth its arms, mutely
insisting on being taken up. It said not a word, being
perhaps under-witted and incapable of prattle. But it
smiled up in his face,--a sort of woful gleam was that
smile, through the sickly blotches that covered its
features,--and found means to express such a perfect
confidence that it was going to be fondled and made
much of, that there was no possibility in a human
heart of balking its expectation. It was as if God had
promised the poor child this favor on behalf of that
individual, and he was bound to fulfil the contract,
or else no longer call himself a man among men.
Nevertheless, it could be no easy thing for him to do,
he being a person burdened with more than an
Englishman's customary reserve, shy of actual
contact with human beings, afflicted with a peculiar
distaste for whatever was ugly, and, furthermore,
accustomed to that habit ofobservation from an insulated
stand-point which is said (but, I hope, erroneously)
to have the tendency of putting ice into the blood.

So I watched the struggle in his mind with a good
deal of interest, and am seriously of opinion that he
did an heroic act, and effected more than he dreamed
of towards his final salvation, when he took up the
loathsome child and caressed it as tenderly as if he
had been its father. To be sure, we all smiled at him,
at the time, but doubtless would have acted pretty
much the same in a similar stress of circumstances.
The child, at any rate, appeared to be satisfied with
his behavior; for when he had held it a considerable
time, and set it down, it still favored him with its
company, keeping fast hold of his forefinger till we
reached the confines of the place. And on our return
through the court-yard, after visiting another part of
the establishment, here again was this same little
Wretchedness waiting for its victim, with a smile of
joyful, and yet dull recognition about its scabby
mouth and in its rheumy eyes. No doubt, the
child's mission in reference to our friend was to
remind him that he was responsible, in his degree, for
all the sufferings and misdemeanors of the world in
which he lived, and was not entitled to look upon a
particle of its dark calamity as if it were none of
his concern: the offspring of a brother's
iniquity being his own blood-relation, and the guilt,
likewise, a burden on him, unless he expiated it by
better deeds.

All the children in this ward seemed to be
invalids, and, going up stairs, we found more of them
in the same or a worse condition than the little
creature just described, with their mothers (or more
probably other women, for the infants were mostly
foundlings) inattendance as nurses. The matron
of the ward, a middle-aged woman, remarkably kind and
motherly in aspect, was walking to and fro across the
chamber--on that weary journey in which careful
mothers and nurses travel so continually and so far,
and gain never a step of progress--with an unquiet
baby in her arms. She assured us that she enjoyed her
occupation, being exceedingly fond of children; and,
in fact, the absence of timidity in all the little
people was a sufficient proof that they could have had
no experience of harsh treatment, though, on the other
hand, none of them appeared to be attracted to one
individual more than another. In this point they
differed widely from the poor child below stairs. They
seemed to recognize a universal motherhood in
womankind, and eared not which individual might be the
mother of the moment. I found their tameness as
shocking as did Alexander Selkirk that of the brute
subjects of his else solitary kingdom. It was a sort
of tame familiarity, a perfect indifference to the
approach of strangers, such as I never noticed in
other children. I accounted for it partly by their
nerveless, unstrung state of body, incapable of the
quick thrills of delight and fear which play upon the
lively harp-strings of a healthy child's nature,
and partly by their woful lack of acquaintance with a
private home, and their being therefore destitute of
the sweet home-bred shyness, which is like the
sanctity of heaven about a mother-petted child. Their
condition was like that of chickens hatched in an
oven, and growing up without the especial guardianship
of a matron hen: both the chicken and the child,
methinks, must needs want something that is essential
to their respective characters.

In this chamber (which was spacious, containing alarge number of beds)
there was a clear fire burning on the hearth, as in
all the other occupied rooms; and directly in front of
the blaze sat a woman holding a baby, which, beyond
all reach of comparison, was the most horrible object
that ever afflicted my sight. Days afterwards--nay,
even now, when I bring it up vividly before my mind's
eye--it seemed to lie upon the floor of my heart,
polluting my moral being with the sense of something
grievously amiss in the entire conditions of humanity.
The holiest man could not be otherwise than full of
wickedness, the chastest virgin seemed impure, in a
world where such a babe was possible. The governor
whispered me, apart, that, like nearly all the rest of
them, it was the child of unhealthy parents. Ah, yes!
There was the mischief. This spectral infant, a
hideous mockery of the visible link which Love creates
between man and woman, was born of disease and sin.
Diseased Sin was its father, and Sinful Disease its
mother, and their offspring lay in the woman's
arms like a nursing Pestilence, which, could it live
and grow up, would make the world a more accursed
abode than ever heretofore. Thank Heaven, it could not
live! This baby, if we must give it that sweet name,
seemed to be three or four months old, but, being such
an unthrifty changeling, might have been considerably
older. It was all covered with blotches, and
preternaturally dark and discolored; it was withered
away, quite shrunken and fleshless; it breathed only
amid pantings and gaspings, and moaned painfully at
every gasp. The only comfort in reference to it was
the evident impossibility of its surviving to draw
many more of those miserable, moaning breaths; and it
would have been infinitely less heart-depressing to
see it die, right before my eyes, than todepart and carry it
alive in my remembrance, still suffering the
incalculable torture of its little life. I can by no
means express how horrible this infant was, neither
ought I to attempt it. And yet I must add one final
touch. Young as the poor little creature was, its pain
and misery had endowed it with a premature
intelligence, insomuch that its eyes seemed to stare
at the by-standers out of their sunken sockets
knowingly and appealingly, as if summoning us one and
all to witness the deadly wrong of its existence. At
least, I so interpreted its look, when it positively
met and responded to my own awe-stricken gaze, and
therefore I lay the case, as far as I am able, before
mankind, on whom God has imposed the necessity to
suffer in soul and body till this dark and dreadful
wrong be righted.

Thence we went to the school-rooms, which were
underneath the chapel. The pupils, like the children
whom we had just seen, were, in large proportion,
foundlings. Almost without exception, they looked
sickly, with marks of eruptive trouble in their
doltish faces, and a general tendency to diseases of
the eye. Moreover, the poor little wretches appeared
to be uneasy within their skins, and screwed
themselves about on the benches in a disagreeably
suggestive way, as if they had inherited the evil
habits of their parents as an innermost garment of the
same texture and material as the shirt of Nessus, and
must wear it with unspeakable discomfort as long as
they lived. I saw only a single child that looked
healthy; and on my pointing him out, the governor
informed me that this little boy, the sole exception
to the miserable aspect of his school-fellows, was not
a foundling, nor properly a work-house child, being
born of respectable parentage,and his father one of the officers
of the institution. As for the remainder,--the
hundred pale abortions to be counted against one
rosy-checked boy,--what shall we say or do? Depressed
by the sight of so much misery, and uninventive of
remedies for the evils that force themselves on my
perception, I can do little more than recur to the
idea already hinted at in the early part of this
article, regarding the speedy necessity of a new
deluge. So far as these children are concerned, at any
rate, it would be a blessing to the human race, which
they will contribute to enervate and corrupt,--a
greater blessing to themselves, who inherit no
patrimony but disease and vice, and in whose souls, if
there be a spark of God's life, this seems the
only possible mode of keeping it aglow,--if every one
of them could be drowned to-night, by their best
friends, instead of being put tenderly to bed. This
heroic method of treating human maladies, moral and
material, is certainly beyond the scope of man's
discretionary rights, and probably will not be adopted
by Divine Providence until the opportunity of milder
reformation shall have been offered us again and
again, through a series of future ages.

It may be fair to acknowledge that the humane and
excellent governor, as well as other persons better
acquainted with the subject than myself, took a less
gloomy view of it, though still so dark a one as to
involve scanty consolation. They remarked that
individuals of the male sex, picked up in the streets
and nurtured in the work-house, sometimes succeed
tolerably well in life, because they are taught trades
before being turned into the world, and, by dint of
immaculate behavior and good luck, are not unlikely to
get employment and earn a livelihood. The case isdifferent with the
girls. They can only go to service, and are invariably
rejected by families of respectability on account of
their origin, and for the better reason of their
unfitness to fill satisfactorily even the meanest
situations in a well-ordered English household. Their
resource is to take service with people only a step or
two above the poorest class, with whom they fare
scantily, endure harsh treatment, lead shifting and
precarious lives, and finally drop into the slough of
evil, through which, in their best estate, they do but
pick their slimy way on stepping-stones.

From the schools we went to the bake-house, and the
brew-house (for such cruelty is not harbored in the
heart of a true Englishman as to deny a pauper his
daily allowance of beer), and through the kitchens,
where we beheld an immense pot over the fire, surging
and walloping with some kind of a savory stew that
filled it up to its brim. We also visited a
tailor's shop, and a shoemaker's shop, in
both of which a number of men, and pale, diminutive
apprentices, were at work, diligently enough, though
seemingly with small heart in the business. Finally,
the governor ushered us into a shed, inside of which
was piled up an immense quantity of new coffins. They
were of the plainest description, made of pine boards,
probably of American growth, not very nicely smoothed
by the plane, neither painted nor stained with black,
but provided with a loop of rope at either end for the
convenience of lifting the rude box and its inmate
into the cart that shall carry them to the
burial-ground. There, in holes ten feet deep, the
paupers are buried one above another, mingling their
relics indistinguishably. In another world may they
resume their individuality, and find it a happier one
than here!

As we departed, a character came under our notice
which I have met with in all almshouses, whether of
the city or village, or in England or America. It was
the familiar simpleton, who shuffled across the
court-yard, clattering his wooden-soled shoes, to
greet us with a howl or a laugh, I hardly know which,
holding out his hand for a penny, and chuckling
grossly when it was given him. All under-witted
persons, so far as my experience goes, have this
craving for copper coin, and appear to estimate its
value by a miraculous instinct, which is one of the
earliest gleams of human intelligence while the nobler
faculties are yet in abeyance. There may come a time,
even in this world, when we shall all understand that
our tendency to the individual appropriation of gold
and broad acres, fine houses, and such good and
beautiful things as are equally enjoyable by a
multitude, is but a trait of imperfectly developed
intelligence, like the simpleton's cupidity of a
penny. When that day dawns,--and probably not till
then,--I imagine that there will be no more poor
streets nor need of almshouses.

I was once present at the wedding of some poor
English people, and was deeply impressed by the
spectacle, though by no means with such proud and
delightful emotions as seem to have affected all
England on the recent occasion of the marriage of its
Prince. It was in the Cathedral at Manchester, a
particularly black and grim old structure, into which
I had stepped to examine some ancient and curious
wood-carvings within the choir. The woman in
attendance greeted me with a smile (which always
glimmers forth on the feminine visage, I know not why,
when a wedding is in question), and asked me to take a
seat in the nave till some poor parties were
married,it being
the Easter holidays, and a good time for them to
marry, because no fees would be demanded by the
clergyman. I sat down accordingly, and soon the parson
and his clerk appeared at the altar, and a
considerable crowd of people made their entrance at a
side-door, and ranged themselves in a long, huddled
line across the chancel. They were my acquaintances
of the poor streets, or persons in a precisely similar
condition of life, and were now come to their
marriage-ceremony in just such garbs as I had always
seen them wear: the men in their loafer's coats,
out at elbows, or their laborers' jackets,
defaced with grimy toil; the women drawing their
shabby shawls tighter about their shoulders, to hide
the raggedness beneath; all of them unbrushed,
unshaven, unwashed, uncombed, and wrinkled with penury
and care; nothing virgin-like in the brides, nor
hopeful or energetic in the bridegrooms;--they were,
in short, the mere rags and tatters of the human race,
whom some east-wind of evil omen, howling along the
streets, had chanced to sweep together into an
unfragrant heap. Each and all of them, conscious of
his or her individual misery, had blundered into the
strange miscalculation of supposing that they could
lessen the sum of it by multiplying it into the misery
of another person. All the couples (and it was
difficult, in such a confused crowd, to compute
exactly their number) stood up at once, and had
execution done upon them in the lump, the clergyman
addressing only small parts of the service to each
individual pair, but so managing the larger portion as
to include the whole company without the trouble of
repetition. By this compendious contrivance, one would
apprehend, he came dangerously near making every man
and woman the husband or wife ofevery other; nor, perhaps, would
he have perpetrated much additional mischief by the
mistake; but, after receiving a benediction in common,
they assorted themselves in their own fashion, as they
only knew how, and departed to the garrets, or the
cellars, or the unsheltered street-corners, where
their honeymoon and subsequent lives were to be spent.
The parson smiled decorously, the clerk and the sexton
grinned broadly, the female attendant tittered almost
aloud, and even the married parties seemed to see
something exceedingly funny in the affair; but for my
part, though generally apt enough to be tickled by a
joke, I laid it away in my memory as one of the
saddest sights I ever looked upon.

Not very long afterwards, I happened to be passing
the same venerable Cathedral, and heard a clang of
joyful bells, and beheld a bridal party coming down
the steps towards a carriage and four horses, with a
portly coachman and two postilions, that waited at the
gate. One parson and one service had amalgamated the
wretchedness of a score of paupers; a Bishop and three
or four clergymen had combined their spiritual might
to forge the golden links of this other marriage-bond.
The bridegroom's mien had a sort of careless and
kindly English pride; the bride floated along in her
white drapery, a creature so nice and delicate that it
was a luxury to see her, and a pity that her silk
slippers should touch anything so grimy as the old
stones of the churchyard avenue. The crowd of ragged
people, who always cluster to witness what they may of
an aristocratic wedding, broke into audible admiration
of the bride's beauty and the bridegroom's manliness,
and uttered prayers and ejaculations (possibly paid
for in alms) for the happiness of both. If themost favorable of
earthly conditions could make them happy, they had
every prospect of it. They were going to live on their
abundance in one of those stately and delightful
English homes, such as no other people ever created or
inherited, a hall set far and safe within its own
private grounds, and surrounded with venerable trees,
shaven lawns, rich shrubbery, and trimmest pathways,
the whole so artfully contrived and tended that summer
rendered it a paradise, and even winter would hardly
disrobe it of its beauty; and all this fair property
seemed more exclusively and inalienably their own,
because of its descent through many fore-fathers, each
of whom had added an improvement or a charm, and thus
transmitted it with a stronger stamp of rightful
possession to his heir. And is it possible, after all,
that there may be a flaw in the title-deeds? Is, or is
not, the system wrong that gives one married pair so
immense a superfluity of luxurious home, and shuts out
a million others from any home whatever? One day or
another, safe as they deem themselves, and safe as the
hereditary temper of the people really tends to make
them, the gentlemen of England will be compelled to
face this question.

CIVIC BANQUETS.

IT has often perplexed me to imagine how an
Englishman will be able to reconcile himself to any
future state of existence from which the earthly
institution of dinner shall be excluded. Even if he
fail to take his appetite along with him (which it
seems to me hardly possible to believe, since this
endowment is so essential to his composition), the
immortal day must still admit an interim of two or
three hours during which he will be conscious of a
slight distaste, at all events, if not an absolute
repugnance, to merely spiritual nutriment. The idea
of dinner has so imbedded itself among his highest and
deepest characteristics, so illuminated itself with
intellect and softened itself with the kindest
emotions of his heart, so linked itself with Church
and State, and grown so majestic with long hereditary
customs and ceremonies, that, by taking it utterly
away, Death, instead of putting the final touch to his
perfection, would leave him infinitely less complete
than we have already known him. He could not be
roundly happy. Paradise, among all its enjoyments,
would lack one daily felicity which his sombre little
island possessed. Perhaps it is not irreverent to
conjecture that a provision may have been made, in
this particular, for the Englishman's exceptional
necessities. It strikes me that Milton was of the
opinion here suggested, and may have intended to throw
out a delightful and consolatory hope for his
countrymen, when he represents the genial archangel as
playing his partwith such excellent appetite at
Adam's dinner-table, and confining himself to
fruit and vegetables only because, in those early days
of her housekeeping, Eve had no more acceptable viands
to set before him. Milton, indeed, had a true English
taste for the pleasures of the table, though refined
by the lofty and poetic discipline to which he had
subjected himself. It is delicately implied in the
refection in Paradise, and more substantially, though
still elegantly, betrayed in the sonnet proposing to
"Laurence, of virtuous father virtuous son," a
series of nice little dinners in midwinter; and it
blazes fully out in that untasted banquet which,
elaborate as it was, Satan tossed up in a trice from
the kitchen-ranges of Tartarus.

Among this people, indeed, so wise in their
generation, dinner has a kind of sanctity quite
independent of the dishes that may be set upon the
table; so that, if it be only a mutton-chop, they
treat it with due reverence, and are rewarded with a
degree of enjoyment which such reckless devourers as
ourselves do not often find in our richest abundance.
It is good to see how stanch they are after fifty or
sixty years of heroic eating, still relying upon their
digestive powers and indulging a vigorous appetite;
whereas an American has generally lost the one and
learned to distrust the other long before reaching the
earliest decline of life; and thenceforward he makes
little account of his dinner, and dines at his peril,
if at all. I know not whether my countrymen will allow
me to tell them, though I think it scarcely too much
to affirm, that on this side of the water, people
never dine. At any rate, abundantly as Nature has
provided us with most of the material requisites, the
highest possible dinner has never yet been eaten in
America. It is theconsummate flower of civilization
and refinement; and our inability to produce it, or to
appreciate its admirable beauty if a happy inspiration
should bring it into bloom, marks fatally the limit of
culture which we have attained.

It is not to be supposed, however, that the mob of
cultivated Englishmen know how to dine in this
elevated sense. The unpolishable ruggedness of the
national character is still an impediment to them,
even in that particular line where they are best
qualified to excel. Though often present at good men's
feasts, I remember only a single dinner, which, while
lamentably conscious that many of its higher
excellences were thrown away upon me, I yet could feel
to be a perfect work of art. It could not, without
unpardonable coarseness, be styled a matter of animal
enjoyment, because, out of the very perfection of that
lower bliss, there had arisen a dream-like development
of spiritual happiness. As in the masterpieces of
painting and poetry, there was a something intangible,
a final deliciousness that only fluttered about your
comprehension, vanishing whenever you tried to detain
it, and compelling you to recognize it by faith rather
than sense. It seemed as if a diviner set of senses
were requisite, and had been partly supplied, for the
special fruition of this banquet, and that the guests
around the table (only eight in number) were becoming
so educated, polished, and softened, by the delicate
influences of what they ate and drank, as to be now a
little more than mortal for the nonce. And there was
that gentle, delicious sadness, too, which we find in
the very summit of our most exquisite enjoyments, and
feel it a charm beyond all the gayety through which it
keeps breathing its undertone. Inthe present case, it was worth a
heavier sigh to reflect that such a festal
achievement--the production of so much art, skill,
fancy, invention, and perfect taste,--the growth of
all the ages, which appeared to have been ripening for
this hour, since man first began to eat and to moisten
his food with wine--must lavish its happiness upon so
brief a moment, when other beautiful things can be
made a joy forever. Yet a dinner like this is no
better than we can get, any day, at the rejuvenescent
Cornhill Coffee-House, unless the whole man, with
soul, intellect, and stomach, is ready to appreciate
it, and unless, moreover, there is such a harmony in
all the circumstances and accompaniments, and
especially such a pitch of well-according minds, that
nothing shall jar rudely against the guest's
thoroughly awakened sensibilities. The world, and
especially our part of it, being the rough,
ill-assorted, and tumultuous place we find it, a
beefsteak is about as good as any other dinner.

The foregoing reminiscence, however, has drawn me
aside from the main object of my sketch, in which I
purposed to give a slight idea of those public, or
partially public banquets, the custom of which so
thoroughly prevails among the English people, that
nothing is ever decided upon, in matters of peace and
war, until they have chewed upon it in the shape, of
roast-beef, and talked it fully over in their cups.
Nor are these festivities merely occasional, but of
stated recurrence in all considerable municipalities
and associated bodies. The most ancient times appear
to have been as familiar with them as the Englishmen
of to-day. In many of the old English towns, you find
some stately Gothic hall or chamber in which the Mayor
and other authorities of the place have longheld their sessions;
and always, in convenient contiguity, there is a dusky
kitchen, with an immense fireplace where an ox might
lie roasting at his ease, though the less gigantic
scale of modern cookery may now have permitted the
cobwebs to gather in its chimney. St. Mary's
Hall, in Coventry, is so good a specimen of an ancient
banqueting-room, that perhaps I may profitably devote
a page or two to the description of it.

In a narrow street, opposite to St. Michael's
Church, one of the three famous spires of Coventry,
you behold a mediæval edifice, in the basement
of which is such a venerable and now deserted kitchen
as I have above alluded to, and, on the same level, a
cellar, with low stone pillars and intersecting
arches, like the crypt of a cathedral. Passing up a
well-worn staircase, the oaken balustrade of which is
as black as ebony, you enter the fine old hall, some
sixty feet in length, and broad and lofty in
proportion. It is lighted by six windows of modern
stained glass, on one side, and by the immense and
magnificent arch of another window at the farther end
of the room, its rich and ancient panes constituting a
genuine historical piece, in which are represented
some of the kingly personages of old times, with their
heraldic blazonries. Notwithstanding the colored light
thus thrown into the hall, and though it was noonday
when I last saw it, the panelling of black-oak, and
some faded tapestry that hung round the walls,
together with the cloudy vault of the roof above, made
a gloom, which the richness only illuminated into more
appreciable effect. The tapestry is wrought with
figures in the dress of Henry VI.'s time (which
is the date of the hall), and is regarded by
antiquaries as authentic evidence both for the costume
of that epoch, and, I believe, for theactual portraiture of men known in
history. They are as colorless as ghosts, however, and
vanish drearily into the old stitch-work of their
substance when you try to make them out. Coats of arms
were formerly emblazoned all round the hall, but have
been almost rubbed out by people hanging their
overcoats against them, or by women with dishclouts
and scrubbing-brushes, obliterating hereditary glories
in their blind hostility to dust and spiders'
webs. Full-length portraits of several English kings,
Charles II. being the earliest, hang on the walls; and
on the daïs, or elevated part of the floor,
stands an antique chair of state, which several royal
characters are traditionally said to have occupied
while feasting here with their loyal subjects of
Coventry. It is roomy enough for a person of kingly
bulk, or even two such, but angular and uncomfortable,
reminding me of the oaken settles which used to be
seen in old-fashioned New England kitchens.

Overhead, supported by a self-sustaining power,
without the aid of a single pillar, is the original
ceiling of oak, precisely similar in shape to the roof
of a barn, with all the beams and rafters plainly to
be seen. At the remote height of sixty feet, you
hardly discern that they are carved with figures of
angels, and doubtless many other devices, of which the
admirable Gothic art is wasted in the duskiness that
has so long been brooding there. Over the entrance of
the hall, opposite the great arched window, the
party-colored radiance of which glimmers faintly
through the interval, is a gallery for minstrels; and
a row of ancient suits of armor is suspended from its
balustrade. It impresses me, too (for, having gone so
far, I would fain leave nothing untouched upon), that
I remember,somewhere about these venerable
precincts, a picture of the Countess Godiva on
horseback, in which the artist has been so niggardly
of that illustrious lady's hair, that, if she had
no ampler garniture, there was certainly much need for
the good people of Coventry to shut their eyes. After
all my pains, I fear that I have made but a poor hand
at the description, as regards a transference of the
scene from my own mind to the reader's. It gave
me a most vivid idea of antiquity that had been very
little tampered with; insomuch that, if a group of
steel-clad knights had come clanking through the
doorway, and a bearded and beruffed old figure had
handed in a stately dame, rustling in gorgeous robes
of a long-forgotten fashion, unveiling a face of
beauty somewhat tarnished in the mouldy tomb, yet
stepping majestically to the trill of harp and viol
from the minstrels' gallery, while the rusty
armor responded with a hollow ringing sound
beneath,--why, I should have felt that these shadows,
once so familiar with the spot, had a better right in
St. Mary's Hall than I, a stranger from a far
country which has no Past. But the moral of the
foregoing description is to show how tenaciously this
love of pompous dinners, this reverence for dinner as
a sacred institution, has caught hold of the English
character; since, from the earliest recognizable
period, we find them building their civic
banqueting-halls as magnificently as their palaces or
cathedrals.

I know not whether the hall just described is now
used for festive purposes, but others of similar
antiquity and splendor still are. For example, there
is Barber-Surgeons' Hall, in London, a very fine
old room, adorned with admirably carved wood-work on
the ceiling and walls. It is also enriched withHolbein's masterpiece,
representing a grave assemblage of barbers and
surgeons, all portraits (with such extensive beards
that methinks one half of the company might have been
profitably occupied in trimming the other), kneeling
before King Henry VIII. Sir Robert Peel is said to
have offered a thousand pounds for the liberty of
cutting out one of the heads from this picture, he
conditioning to have a perfect facsimile painted in.
The room has many other pictures of distinguished
members of the company in long-past times, and of some
of the monarchs and statesmen of England, all darkened
with age, but darkened into such ripe magnificence as
only age could bestow. It is not my design to inflict
any more specimens of ancient hall-painting on the
reader; but it may be worth while to touch upon other
modes of stateliness that still survive in these
time-honored civic feasts, where there appears to be a
singular assumption of dignity and solemn pomp by
respectable citizens who would never dream of claiming
any privilege of rank outside of their own sphere.
Thus, I saw two caps of state for the warden and
junior warden of the company, caps of silver (real
coronets or crowns, indeed, for these city-grandees)
wrought in open-work and lined with crimson velvet. In
a strong-closet, opening from the hall, there was a
great deal of rich plate to furnish forth the
banquet-table, comprising hundreds of forks and
spoons, a vast silver punch-bowl, the gift of some
jolly king or other, and, besides a multitude of less
noticeable vessels, two loving-cups, very elaborately
wrought in silver gilt, one presented by Henry VIII.,
the other by Charles II. These cups, including the
covers and pedestals, are very large and weighty,
although the bowl-part would hardly contain more
thanhalf a pint of
wine, which, when the custom was first established,
each guest was probably expected to drink off at a
draught. In passing them from hand to hand adown a
long table of compotators, there is a peculiar
ceremony which I may hereafter have occasion to
describe. Meanwhile, if I might assume such a liberty,
I should be glad to invite the reader to the official
dinner-table of his Worship, the Mayor, at a large
English seaport where I spent several years. The
Mayor's dinner-parties occur as often as once a
fortnight, and, inviting his guests by fifty or sixty
at a time, his Worship probably assembles at his board
most of the eminent citizens and distinguished
personages of the town and neighborhood more than once
during his year's incumbency, and very much, no
doubt, to the promotion of good feeling among
individuals of opposite parties and diverse pursuits
in life. A miscellaneous party of Englishmen can
always find more comfortable ground to meet upon than
as many Americans, their differences of opinion being
incomparably less radical than ours, and it being the
sincerest wish of all their hearts, whether they call
themselves Liberals or what not, that nothing in this
world shall ever be greatly altered from what it has
been and is. Thus there is seldom such a virulence of
political hostility that it may not be dissolved in a
glass or two of wine, without making the good liquor
any more dry or bitter than accords with English
taste.

The first dinner of this kind at which I had the
honor to be present took place during assize-time, and
included among the guests the judges and the prominent
members of the bar. Reaching the Town Hall at seven
o'clock, I communicated my name to one ofseveral splendidly
dressed footmen, and he repeated it to another on the
first staircase, by whom it was passed to a third, and
thence to a fourth at the door of the reception-room,
losing all resemblance to the original sound in the
course of these transmissions; so that I had the
advantage of making my entrance in the character of a
stranger, not only to the whole company, but to myself
as well. His Worship, however, kindly recognized me,
and put me on speaking-terms with two or three
gentlemen, whom I found very affable, and all the more
hospitably attentive on the score of my nationality.
It is very singular how kind an Englishman will almost
invariably be to an individual American, without ever
bating a jot of his prejudice against the American
character in the lump. My new acquaintances took
evident pains to put me at my ease; and, in requital
of their good-nature, I soon began to look round at
the general company in a critical spirit, making my
crude observations apart, and drawing silent
inferences, of the correctness of which I should not
have been half so well satisfied a year afterwards as
at that moment.

There were two judges present, a good many lawyers,
and a few officers of the army in uniform. The other
guests seemed to be principally of the mercantile
class, and among them was a ship-owner from Nova
Scotia, with whom I coalesced a little, inasmuch as we
were born with the same sky over our heads, and an
unbroken continuity of soil between his abode and
mine. There was one old gentleman, whose character I
never made out, with powdered hair, clad in black
breeches and silk stockings, and wearing a rapier at
his side; otherwise, with the exception of the
military uniforms, there was little or no pretence
ofofficial costume.
It being the first considerable assemblage of
Englishmen that I had seen, my honest impression about
them was, that they were a heavy and homely set of
people, with a remarkable roughness of aspect and
behavior, not repulsive, but beneath which it required
more familiarity with the national character than I
then possessed always to detect the good breeding of a
gentleman. Being generally middle-aged, or still
further advanced, they were by no means graceful in
figure; for the comeliness of the youthful Englishman
rapidly diminishes with years, his body appearing to
grow longer, his legs to abbreviate themselves, and
his stomach to assume the dignified prominence which
justly belongs to that metropolis of his system. His
face (what with the acridity of the atmosphere, ale at
lunch, wine at dinner, and a well-digested abundance
of succulent food) gets red and mottled, and develops
at least one additional chin, with a promise of more;
so that, finally, a stranger recognizes his animal
part at the most superficial glance, but must take
time and a little pains to discover the intellectual.
Comparing him with an American, I really thought that
our national paleness and lean habit of flesh gave us
greatly the advantage in an æsthetic point of
view. It seemed to me, moreover, that the English
tailor had not done so much as he might and ought for
these heavy figures, but had gone on wilfully
exaggerating their uncouthness by the roominess of
their garments; he had evidently no idea of accuracy
of fit, and smartness was entirely out of his line.
But, to be quite open with the reader, I afterwards
learned to think that this aforesaid tailor has a
deeper art than his brethren among ourselves, knowing
how to dress his customers with suchindividual propriety that they
look as if they were born in their clothes, the fit
being to the character rather than the form. If you
make an Englishman smart (unless he be a very
exceptional one, of whom I have seen a few), you make
him a monster; his best aspect is that of ponderous
respectability.

To make an end of these first impressions, I
fancied that not merely the Suffolk bar, but the bar
of any inland county in New England, might show a set
of thin-visaged men looking wretchedly worn, sallow,
deeply wrinkled across the forehead, and grimly
furrowed about the mouth, with whom these
heavy-checked English lawyers, slow-paced and
fat-witted as they must needs be, would stand very
little chance in a professional contest. How that
matter might turn out, I am unqualified to decide. But
I state these results of my earliest glimpses at
Englishmen, not for what they are worth, but because I
ultimately gave them up as worth little or nothing. In
course of time, I came to the conclusion that
Englishmen of all ages are a rather good-looking
people, dress in admirable taste from their own point
of view, and, under a surface never silken to the
touch, have a refinement of manners too thorough and
genuine to be thought of as a separate
endowment,--that is to say, if the individual himself
be a man of station, and has had gentlemen for his
father and grandfather. The sturdy Anglo-Saxon nature
does not refine itself short of the third generation.
The tradesmen, too, and all other classes, have their
own proprieties. The only value of my criticisms,
therefore, lay in their exemplifying the proneness of
a traveller to measure one people by the distinctive
characteristics of another,--as English writers
invariably measure us, and take upon themselvesto be disgusted
accordingly, instead of trying to find out some
principle of beauty with which we may be in
conformity.

In due time we were summoned to the table, and went
thither in no solemn procession, but with a good deal
of jostling, thrusting behind, and scrambling for
places when we reached our destination. The legal
gentlemen, I suspect, were responsible for this
indecorous zeal, which I never afterwards remarked in
a similar party. The dining-hall was of noble size,
and, like the other rooms of the suite, was gorgeously
painted and gilded and brilliantly illuminated. There
was a splendid table-service, and a noble array of
footmen, some of them in plain clothes, and others
wearing the town-livery, richly decorated with
gold-lace, and themselves excellent specimens of the
blooming young manhood of Britain. When we were fairly
seated, it was certainly an agreeable spectacle to
look up and down the long vista of earnest faces, and
behold them so resolute, so conscious that there was
an important business in hand, and so determined to be
equal to the occasion. Indeed, Englishman or not, I
hardly know what can be prettier than a snow-white
table-cloth, a huge heap of flowers as a central
decoration, bright silver, rich china, crystal
glasses, decanters of Sherry at due intervals, a
French roll and an artistically folded napkin at each
plate, all that airy portion of a banquet, in short,
that comes before the first mouthful, the whole
illuminated by a blaze of artificial light, without
which a dinner of made-dishes looks spectral, and the
simplest viands are the best. Printed bills-of-fare
were distributed, representing an abundant feast, no
part of which appeared on the table until called for
in separate plates. I have entirelyforgotten what it was, but deem it
no great matter, inasmuch as there is a pervading
commonplace and identicalness in the composition of
extensive dinners, on account of the impossibility of
supplying a hundred guests with anything particularly
delicate or rare. It was suggested to me that certain
juicy old gentlemen had a private understanding what
to call for, and that it would be good policy in a
stranger to follow in their footsteps though the
feast. I did not care to do so, however, because, like
Sancho Panza's dip out of Camacho's caldron,
any sort of potluck at such a table would be sure to
suit my purpose; so I chose a dish or two on my own
judgment, and, getting through my labors betimes, had
great pleasure in seeing the Englishmen toil onward to
the end.

They drank rather copiously, too, though wisely;
for I observed that they seldom took Hock, and let the
Champagne bubble slowly away out of the goblet,
solacing themselves with Sherry, but tasting it warily
before bestowing their final confidence. Their taste
in wines, however, did not seem so exquisite, and
certainly was not so various, as that to which many
Americans pretend. This foppery of an intimate
acquaintance with rare vintages does not suit a
sensible Englishman, as he is very much in earnest
about his wines, and adopts one or two as his lifelong
friends, seldom exchanging them for any Delilahs of a
moment, and reaping the reward of his constancy in an
unimpaired stomach, and only so much gout as he deems
wholesome and desirable. Knowing well the measure of
his powers, he is not apt to fill his glass too often.
Society, indeed, would hardly tolerate habitual
imprudences of that kind, though, in my opinion, the
Englishmen now upon the stage could carryoff their three
bottles, at need, with as steady a gait as any of
their forefathers. It is not so very long since the
three-bottle heroes sank finally under the table. It
may be (at least, I should be glad if it were true)
that there was an occult sympathy between our
temperance reform, now somewhat in abeyance, and the
almost simultaneous disappearance of hard-drinking
among the respectable classes in England. I remember a
middle-aged gentleman telling me (in illustration of
the very slight importance attached to breaches of
temperance within the memory of men not yet old) that
he had seen a certain magistrate, Sir John Linkwater,
or Drinkwater,--but I think the jolly old knight could
hardly have staggered under so perverse a misnomer as
this last,--while sitting on the magisterial bench,
pull out a crown-piece and hand it to the clerk.
"Mr. Clerk," said Sir John, as if it were
the most indifferent fact in the world, "I was
drunk last night. There are my five shillings."

During the dinner, I had a good deal of pleasant
conversation with the gentlemen on either side of me.
One of them, a lawyer, expatiated with great unction
on the social standing of the judges. Representing the
dignity and authority of the Crown, they take
precedence, during assize-time, of the highest
military men in the kingdom, of the Lord Lieutenant of
the county, of the Archbishops, of the royal Dukes,
and even of the Prince of Wales. For the nonce, they
are the greatest men in England. With a glow of
professional complacency that amounted to enthusiasm,
my friend assured me, that, in case of a royal dinner,
a judge, if actually holding an assize, would be
expected to offer his arm and take the Queen herself
to the table. Happening to be in company withsome of these elevated
personages, on subsequent occasions, it appeared to me
that the judges are fully conscious of their paramount
claims to respect, and take rather more pains to
impress them on their ceremonial inferiors than men of
high hereditary rank are apt to do. Bishops, if it be
not irreverent to say so, are sometimes marked by a
similar characteristic. Dignified position is so sweet
to an Englishman, that he needs to be born in it, and
to feel it thoroughly incorporated with his nature
from its original germ, in order to keep him from
flaunting it obtrusively in the faces of innocent
by-standers.

My companion on the other side was a thick-set,
middle-aged man, uncouth in manners, and ugly where
none were handsome, with a dark, roughly hewn visage,
that looked grim in repose, and seemed to hold within
itself the machinery of a very terrific frown. He ate
with resolute appetite, and let slip few opportunities
of imbibing whatever liquids happened to be passing
by. I was meditating in what way this grisly featured
table-fellow might most safely be accosted, when he
turned to me with a surly sort of kindness, and
invited me to take a glass of wine. We then began a
conversation that abounded, on his part, with sturdy
sense, and, somehow or other, brought me closer to him
than I had yet stood to an Englishman. I should
hardly have taken him to be an educated man, certainly
not a scholar of accurate training; and yet he seemed
to have all the resources of education and trained
intellectual power at command. My fresh Americanism,
and watchful observation of English characteristics,
appeared either to interest or amuse him, or perhaps
both. Under the mollifying influences of abundance of
meat and drink, he grew verygracious (not that I ought to use
such a phrase to describe his evidently genuine
good-will), and by and by expressed a wish for further
acquaintance, asking me to call at his rooms in London
and inquire for Sergeant Wilkins,--throwing out the
name forcibly, as if he had no occasion to be ashamed
of it. I remembered Dean Swift's retort to
Sergeant Bettesworth on a similar announcement,--"Of
what regiment, pray, sir?"--and fancied that the
same question might not have been quite amiss, if
applied to the rugged individual at my side. But I
heard of him subsequently as one of the prominent men
at the English bar, a rough customer, and a terribly
strong champion in criminal cases; and it caused me
more regret than might have been expected, on so
slight an acquaintanceship, when, not long afterwards,
I saw his death announced in the newspapers. Not rich
in attractive qualities, he possessed, I think, the
most attractive one of all,--thorough manhood.

After the cloth was removed, a goodly group of
decanters were set before the Mayor, who sent them
forth on their outward voyage, full freighted with
Port, Sherry, Madeira, and Claret, of which excellent
liquors, methought, the latter found least acceptance
among the guests. When every man had filled his glass,
his Worship stood up and proposed a toast. It was, of
course, "Our gracious Sovereign," or words
to that effect; and immediately a band of musicians,
whose preliminary tootings and thrummings I had
already heard behind me, struck up "God save the
Queen!" and the whole company rose with one
impulse to assist in singing that famous national
anthem. It was the first time in my life that I had
ever seen a body of men, or even a single man, under
the activeinfluence
of the sentiment of Loyalty; for, though we call
ourselves loyal to our country and institutions, and
prove it by our readiness to shed blood and sacrifice
life in their behalf, still the principle is as cold
and hard, in an American bosom, as the steel spring
that puts in motion a powerful machinery. In the
Englishman's system, a force similar to that of
our steel spring is generated by the warm throbbings
of human hearts. He clothes our bare abstraction in
flesh and blood,--at present, in the flesh and blood
of a woman,--and manages to combine love, awe, and
intellectual reverence, all in one emotion, and to
embody his mother, his wife, his children, the whole
idea of kindred, in a single person, and make her the
representative of his country and its laws. We
Americans smile superior, as I did at the Mayor's
table; and yet, I fancy, we lose some very agreeable
titillations of the heart in consequence of our proud
prerogative of caring no more about our President than
for a man of straw, or a stuffed scarecrow straddling
in a cornfield.

But, to say the truth, the spectacle struck me
rather ludicrously, to see this party of stout
middle-aged and elderly gentlemen, in the fulness of
meat and drink, their ample and ruddy faces glistening
with wine, perspiration, and enthusiasm, rumbling out
those strange old stanzas from the very bottom of
their hearts and stomachs, which two organs, in the
English interior arrangement, lie closer together than
in ours. The song seemed to me the rudest old ditty in
the world; but I could not wonder at its universal
acceptance and indestructible popularity, considering
how inimitably it expresses the national faith and
feeling as regards the inevitable righteousness ofEngland, the
Almighty's consequent respect and partiality for
that redoubtable little island, and his presumed
readiness to strengthen its defence against the
contumacious wickedness and knavery of all other
principalities or republics. Tennyson himself, though
evidently English to the very last prejudice, could
not write half so good a song for the purpose. Finding
that the entire dinner-table struck in, with voices of
every pitch between rolling thunder and the squeak of
a cart-wheel, and that the strain was not of such
delicacy as to be much hurt by the harshest of them, I
determined to lend my own assistance in swelling the
triumphant roar. It seemed but a proper courtesy to
the first Lady in the land, whose guest; in the
largest sense, I might consider myself. Accordingly,
my first tuneful efforts (and probably my last, for I
purpose not to sing any more, unless it be "Hail
Columbia" on the restoration of the Union) were
poured freely forth in honor of Queen Victoria. The
Sergeant smiled like the carved head of a Swiss
nutcracker, and the other gentlemen in my
neighborhood, by nods and gestures, evinced grave
approbation of so suitable a tribute to English
superiority; and we finished our stave and sat down in
an extremely happy frame of mind.

Other toasts followed in honor of the great
institutions and interests of the country, and
speeches in response to each were made by individuals
whom the Mayor designated or the company called for.
None of them impressed me with a very high idea of
English postprandial oratory. It is inconceivable,
indeed, what ragged and shapeless utterances most
Englishmen are satisfied to give vent to, without
attempting anything like artistic shape, but clapping
on a patchhere and
another there, and ultimately getting out what they
want to say, and generally with a result of
sufficiently good sense, but in some such disorganized
mass as if they had thrown it up rather than spoken
it. It seemed to me that this was almost as much by
choice as necessity. An Englishman, ambitious of
public favor, should not be too smooth. If an orator
is glib, his countrymen distrust him. They dislike
smartness. The stronger and heavier his thoughts, the
better, provided there be an element of commonplace
running through them; and any rough, yet never vulgar
force of expression, such as would knock an opponent
down if it hit him, only it must not be too personal,
is altogether to their taste; but a studied neatness
of language, or other such superficial graces, they
cannot abide. They do not often permit a man to make
himself a fine orator of malice aforethought, that is,
unless he be a nobleman (as, for example, Lord
Stanley, of the Derby family), who, as an hereditary
legislator and necessarily a public speaker, is bound
to remedy a poor natural delivery in the best way he
can. On the whole, I partly agree with them, and, if I
cared for any oratory whatever, should be as likely to
applaud theirs as our own. When an English speaker
sits down, you feel that you have been listening to a
real man, and not to an actor; his sentiments have a
wholesome earth-smell in them, though, very likely,
this apparent naturalness is as much an art as what we
expend in rounding a sentence or elaborating a
peroration.

It is one good effect of this inartificial style,
that nobody in England seems to feel any shyness about
shovelling the untrimmed and untrimmable ideas out of
his mind for the benefit of an audience. At least,nobody did on the
occasion now in hand, except a poor little Major of
Artillery, who responded for the Army in a thin,
quavering voice, with a terribly hesitating trickle of
fragmentary ideas, and, I question not, would rather
have been bayoneted in front of his batteries than to
have said a word. Not his own mouth, but the
cannon's, was this poor Major's proper organ
of utterance.

While I was thus amiably occupied in criticising my
fellow-guests, the Mayor had got up to propose another
toast; and listening rather inattentively to the first
sentence or two, I soon became sensible of a drift in
his Worship's remarks that made me glance
apprehensively towards Sergeant Wilkins. "Yes,"
grumbled that gruff personage, shoving a decanter of
Port towards me, "it is your turn next"; and seeing in
my face, I suppose, the consternation of a wholly
unpractised orator, he kindly added, "It is nothing. A
mere acknowledgment will answer the purpose. The less
you say, the better they will like it." That
being the case, I suggested that perhaps they would
like it best if I said nothing at all. But the
Sergeant shook his head. Now, on first receiving the
Mayor's invitation to dinner, it had occurred to
me that I might possibly be brought into my present
predicament; but I had dismissed the idea from my mind
as too disagreeable to be entertained, and, moreover,
as so alien from my disposition and character that
Fate surely could not keep such a misfortune in store
for me. If nothing else prevented, an earthquake or
the crack of doom would certainly interfere before I
need rise to speak. Yet here was the Mayor getting on
inexorably,--and, indeed, I heartily wished that he
might get on and on forever, and of his wordy
wanderings find no end.

If the gentle reader, my kindest friend and closest
confidant, deigns to desire it, I can impart to him my
own experience as a public speaker quite as
indifferently as if it concerned another person.
Indeed, it does concern another, or a mere spectral
phenomenon, for it was not I, in my proper and natural
self, that sat there at table or subsequently rose to
speak. At the moment, then, if the choice had been
offered me whether the Mayor should let off a speech
at my head or a pistol, I should unhesitatingly have
taken the latter alternative. I had really nothing to
say, not an idea in my head, nor, which was a great
deal worse, any flowing words or embroidered sentences
in which to dress out that empty Nothing, and give it
a cunning aspect of intelligence, such as might last
the poor vacuity the little time it had to live. But
time pressed; the Mayor brought his remarks,
affectionately eulogistic of the United States and
highly complimentary to their distinguished
representative at that table, to a close, amid a vast
deal of cheering; and the band struck up "Hail
Columbia," I believe, though it might have been
"Old Hundred," or "God save the
Queen" over again, for anything that I should
have known or cared. When the music ceased, there was
an intensely disagreeable instant, during which I
seemed to rend away and fling off the habit of a
lifetime, and rose, still void of ideas, but with
preternatural composure, to make a speech. The guests
rattled on the table, and cried, "Hear!"
most vociferously, as if now, at length, in this
foolish and idly garrulous world, had come the
long-expected moment when one golden word was to be
spoken; and in that imminent crisis, I caught a
glimpse of a little bit of an effusion of
international sentiment, which it might, and must, and
should do to utter.

Well; it was nothing, as the Sergeant had said.
What surprised me most was the sound of my own voice,
which I had never before heard at declamatory pitch,
and which impressed me as belonging to some other
person, who, and not myself, would be responsible for
the speech: a prodigious consolation and encouragement
under the circumstances! I went on without the
slightest embarrassment, and sat down amid great
applause, wholly undeserved by anything that I had
spoken, but well won from Englishmen, methought, by
the new development of pluck that alone had enabled me
to speak at all. "It was handsomely done!"
quoth Sergeant Wilkins; and I felt like a recruit who
had been for the first time under fire.

I would gladly have ended my oratorical career then
and there forever, but was often placed in a similar
or worse position, and compelled to meet it as I best
might; for this was one of the necessities of an
office which I had voluntarily taken on my shoulders,
and beneath which I might be crushed by no moral
delinquency on my own part, but could not shirk
without cowardice and shame. My subsequent fortune was
various. Once, though I felt it to be a kind of imposture,
I got a speech by heart, and doubtless it might
have been a very pretty one, only I forgot every
syllable at the moment of need, and had to improvise
another as well as I could. I found it a better method
to prearrange a few points in my mind, and trust to
the spur of the occasion, and the kind aid of
Providence, for enabling me to bring them to bear. The
presence of any considerable proportion of personal
friends generally dumbfounded me. I would rather have
talked with an enemy in the gate. Invariably, too, I
was much embarrassed by a small audience, andsucceeded better with
a large one,--the sympathy of a multitude possessing a
buoyant effect, which lifts the speaker a little way
out of his individuality, and tosses him towards a
perhaps better range of sentiment than his private
one. Again, if I rose carelessly and confidently, with
an expectation of going through the business entirely
at my ease, I often found that I had little or nothing
to say; whereas, if I came to the charge in perfect
despair, and at a crisis when failure would have been
horrible, it once or twice happened that the frightful
emergency concentrated my poor faculties, and enabled
me to give definite and vigorous expression to
sentiments which an instant before looked as vague and
far off as the clouds in the atmosphere. On the
whole, poor as my own success may have been, I
apprehend that any intelligent man with a tongue
possesses the chief requisite of oratorical power, and
may develop many of the others, if he deems it worth
while to bestow a great amount of labor and pains on
an object which the most accomplished orators, I
suspect, have not found altogether satisfactory to
their highest impulses. At any rate, it must be a
remarkably true man who can keep his own elevated
conception of truth when the lower feeling of a
multitude is assailing his natural sympathies, and who
can speak out frankly the best that there is in him,
when by adulterating it a little, or a good deal, he
knows that he may make it ten times as acceptable to
the audience.

This slight article on the civic banquets of
England would be too wretchedly imperfect without an
attempted description of a Lord Mayor's dinner at the
Mansion House in London. I should have preferredthe annual feast at
Guildhall, but never had the good fortune to witness
it. Once, however, I was honored with an invitation to
one of the regular dinners, and gladly accepted
it,--taking the precaution, nevertheless, though it
hardly seemed necessary, to inform the City-King,
though a mutual friend, that I was no fit
representative of American eloquence, and must humbly
make it a condition that I should not be expected to
open my mouth, except for the reception of his
Lordship's bountiful hospitality. The reply was
gracious and acquiescent; so that I presented myself
in the great entrance-hall of the Mansion House, at
half-past six o'clock, in a state of most
enjoyable freedom from the pusillanimous apprehensions
that often tormented me at such times. The Mansion
House was built in Queen Anne's days, in the very
heart of old London, and is a palace worthy of its
inhabitant, were he really as great a man as his
traditionary state and pomp would seem to indicate.
Times are changed, however, since the days of
Whittington, or even of Hogarth's Industrious
Apprentice, to whom the highest imaginable reward of
lifelong integrity was a seat in the Lord Mayor's
chair. People nowadays say that the real dignity and
importance have perished out of the office, as they
do, sooner or later, out of all earthly institutions,
leaving only a painted and gilded shell like that of
an Easter egg, and that it is only second-rate and
third-rate men who now condescend to be ambitious of
the Mayoralty. I felt a little grieved at this; for
the original emigrants of New England had strong
sympathies with the people of London, who were mostly
Puritans in religion and Parliamentarians in politics,
in the early days of our country; so that the Lord
Mayor was a potentate of huge dimensionsin the estimation of our
forefathers, and held to be hardly second to the prime
minister of the throne. The true great men of the
city now appear to have aims beyond city greatness,
connecting themselves with national politics, and
seeking to be identified with the aristocracy of the
country.

In the entrance-hall I was received by a body of
footmen dressed in a livery of blue coats and buff
breeches, in which they looked wonderfully like
American Revolutionary generals, only bedizened with
far more lace and embroidery than those simple and
grand old heroes ever dreamed of wearing. There were
likewise two very imposing figures, whom I should have
taken to be military men of rank, being arrayed in
scarlet coats and large silver epaulets; but they
turned out to be officers of the Lord Mayor's
household, and were now employed in assigning to the
guests the places which they were respectively to
occupy at the dinner-table. Our names (for I had
included myself in a little group of friends) were
announced; and ascending the staircase, we met his
Lordship in the doorway of the first reception-room,
where, also, we had the advantage of a presentation to
the Lady Mayoress. As this distinguished couple
retired into private life at the termination of their
year of office, it is inadmissible to make any
remarks, critical or laudatory, on the manners and
bearing of two personages suddenly emerging from a
position of respectable mediocrity into one of
preëminent dignity within their own sphere. Such
individuals almost always seem to grow nearly or quite
to the full size of their office. If it were desirable
to write an essay on the latent aptitude of ordinary
people for grandeur, we have an exemplification in
our own country, and on a scaleincomparably greater than that of
the Mayoralty, though invested with nothing like the
outward magnificence that gilds and embroiders the
latter. If I have been correctly informed, the Lord
Mayor's salary is exactly double that of the President
of the United States, and yet is found very inadequate
to his necessary expenditure.

There were two reception-rooms, thrown into one by
the opening of wide folding-doors; and though in an
old style, and not yet so old as to be venerable, they
are remarkably handsome apartments, lofty as well as
spacious, with carved ceilings and walls, and at
either end a splendid fireplace of white marble,
ornamented with sculptured wreaths of flowers and
foliage. The company were about three hundred, many of
them celebrities in politics, war, literature, and
science, though I recollect none preëminently
distinguished in either department. But it is
certainly a pleasant mode of doing honor to men of
literature, for example, who deserve well of the
public, yet do not often meet it face to face, thus to
bring them together under genial auspices, in
connection with persons of note in other lines. I
know not what may be the Lord Mayor's mode or
principle of selecting his guests, nor whether, during
his official term, he can proffer his hospitality to
every man of noticeable talent in the wide world of
London, nor, in fine, whether his Lordship's
invitation is much sought for or valued; but it seemed
to me that this periodical feast is one of the many
sagacious methods which the English have contrived for
keeping up a good understanding among different sorts
of people. Like most other distinctions of society,
however, I presume that the Lord Mayor's card does not
often seek out modest merit, but comes at last when
therecipient is
conscious of the bore, and doubtful about the honor.

One very pleasant characteristic, which I never met
with at any other public or partially public dinner,
was the presence of ladies. No doubt, they were
principally the wives and daughters of city magnates;
and if we may judge from the many sly allusions in old
plays and satirical poems, the city of London has
always been famous for the beauty of its women and the
reciprocal attractions between them and the men of
quality. Be that as it might, while straying hither
and thither through those crowded apartments, I saw
much reason for modifying certain heterodox opinions
which I had imbibed, in my Transatlantic newness and
rawness, as regarded the delicate character and
frequent occurrence of English beauty. To state the
entire truth (being, at this period, some years old in
English life), my taste, I fear, had long since begun
to be deteriorated by acquaintance with other models
of feminine loveliness than it was my happiness to
know in America. I often found, or seemed to find, if
I may dare to confess it, in the persons of such of my
dear countrywomen as I now occasionally met, a certain
meagreness, (Heaven forbid that I should call it
scrawniness!) a deficiency of physical development, a
scantiness, so to speak, in the pattern of their
material make, a paleness of complexion, a thinness of
voice,--all of which characteristics, nevertheless,
only made me resolve so much the more sturdily to
uphold these fair creatures as angels, because I was
sometimes driven to a half-acknowledgment that the
English ladies, looked at from a lower point of view,
were perhaps a little finer animals than they. The
advantages of the latter, if any they could really be
said tohave, were
all comprised in a few additional lumps of clay on
their shoulders and other parts of their figures. It
would be a pitiful bargain to give up the ethereal
charm of American beauty in exchange for half a
hundred-weight of human clay!

At a given signal we all found our way into an
immense room, called the Egyptian Hall, I know not
why, except that the architecture was classic, and as
different as possible from the ponderous style of
Memphis and the Pyramids. A powerful band played
inspiringly as we entered, and a brilliant profusion
of light shone down on two long tables, extending the
whole length of the hall, and a cross-table between
them, occupying nearly its entire breadth. Glass
gleamed and silver glistened on an acre or two of
snowy damask, over which were set out all the
accompaniments of a stately feast. We found our places
without much difficulty, and the Lord Mayor's
chaplain implored a blessing on the food,--a ceremony
which the English never omit, at a great dinner or a
small one, yet consider, I fear, not so much a
religious rite as a sort of preliminary relish before
the soup.

The soup, of course, on this occasion, was turtle,
of which, in accordance with immemorial custom, each
guest was allowed two platefuls, in spite of the
otherwise immitigable law of table-decorum. Indeed,
judging from the proceedings of the gentlemen near me,
I surmised that there was no practical limit, except
the appetite of the guests and the capacity of the
soup-tureens. Not being fond of this civic dainty, I
partook of it but once, and then only in accordance
with the wise maxim, always to taste a fruit, a wine,
or a celebrated dish, at its indigenous site; and the
very fountain-head of turtle-soup, I suppose, is in
the LordMayor's dinner-pot. It is one
of those orthodox customs which people follow for half
a century without knowing why, to drink a sip of
rum-punch, in a very small tumbler, after the soup. It
was excellently well-brewed, and it seemed to me
almost worth while to sup the soup for the sake of
sipping the punch. The rest of the dinner was
catalogued in a bill-of-fare printed on delicate white
paper within an arabesque border of green and gold. It
looked very good, not only in the English and French
names of the numerous dishes, but also in the positive
reality of the dishes themselves, which were all set
on the table to be carved and distributed by the
guests. This ancient and honest method is attended
with a good deal of trouble, and a lavish effusion of
gravy, yet by no means bestowed or dispensed in vain,
because you have thereby the absolute assurance of a
banquet actually before your eyes, instead of a
shadowy promise in the bill-of-fare, and such meagre
fulfilment as a single guest can contrive to get upon
his individual plate. I wonder that Englishmen, who
are fond of looking at prize-oxen in the shape of
butcher's-meat, do not generally better estimate
the æsthetic gormandism of devouring the whole
dinner with their eyesight, before proceeding to
nibble the comparatively few morsels which, after all,
the most heroic appetite and widest stomachic capacity
of mere mortals can enable even an alderman really to
eat. There fell to my lot three delectable things
enough, which I take pains to remember, that the
reader may not go away wholly unsatisfied from the
Barmecide feast to which I have bidden him,--a red
mullet, a plate of mushrooms, exquisitely stewed, and
part of a ptarmigan, a bird of the same family as the
grouse, but feeding high uptowards the summit of the Scotch
mountains, whence it gets a wild delicacy of flavor
very superior to that of the artificially nurtured
English game-fowl. All the other dainties have
vanished from my memory as completely as those of
Prospero's banquet after Ariel had clapped his
wings over it. The band played at intervals
inspiriting us to new efforts, as did likewise the
sparkling wines which the footmen supplied from an
inexhaustible cellar, and which the guests quaffed
with little apparent reference to the disagreeable
fact that there comes a to-morrow morning after every
feast. As long as that shall be the case, a prudent
man can never have full enjoyment of his dinner.

Nearly opposite to me, on the other side of the
table, sat a young lady in white, whom I am sorely
tempted to describe, but dare not, because not only
the supereminence of her beauty, but its peculiar
character, would cause the sketch to be recognized,
however rudely it might be drawn. I hardly thought
that there existed such a woman outside of a
picture-frame, or the covers of a romance: not that I
had ever met with her resemblance even there, but,
being so distinct and singular an apparition, she
seemed likelier to find her sisterhood in poetry and
picture than in real life. Let us turn away from her,
lest a touch too apt should compel her stately and
cold and soft and womanly grace to gleam out upon my
page with a strange repulsion and unattainableness in
the very spell that made her beautiful. At her side,
and familiarly attentive to her, sat a gentleman of
whom I remember only a hard outline of the nose and
forehead, and such a monstrous portent of a beard that
you could discover no symptom of a mouth, except when
he opened it to speak, or to put in a morsel of
food.Then, indeed,
you suddenly became aware of a cave hidden behind the
impervious and darksome shrubbery. There could be no
doubt who this gentleman and lady were. Any child
would have recognized them at a glance. It was
Bluebeard and a new wife (the loveliest of the series,
but with already a mysterious gloom overshadowing her
fair young brow) travelling in their honeymoon, and
dining, among other distinguished strangers, at the
Lord Mayor's table.

After an hour or two of valiant achievement with
knife and fork came the dessert; and at the point of
the festival where finger-glasses are usually
introduced, a large silver basin was carried round to
the guests, containing rose-water, into which we
dipped the ends of our napkins and were conscious of a
delightful fragrance, instead of that heavy and weary
odor, the hateful ghost of a defunct dinner. This
seems to be an ancient custom of the city, not
confined to the Lord Mayor's table, but never met with
westward of Temple Bar.

During all the feast, in accordance with another
ancient custom, the origin or purport of which I do
not remember to have heard, there stood a man in
armor, with a helmet on his head, behind his
Lordship's chair. When the after-dinner wine was
placed on the table, still another official personage
appeared behind the chair, and proceeded to make a
solemn and sonorous proclamation (in which he
enumerated the principal guests, comprising three or
four noblemen, several baronets, and plenty of
generals, members of Parliament, aldermen, and other
names of the illustrious, one of which sounded
strangely familiar to my ears), ending in some such
style as this: "and other gentlemen and ladies,
here present, the Lord Mayor drinks to you allin a
loving-cup,"--giving a sort of sentimental twang
to the two words,--"and sends it round among
you!" And forthwith the loving-cup--several of
them, indeed, on each side of the tables--came slowly
down with all the antique ceremony.

The fashion of it is thus. The Lord Mayor, standing
up and taking the covered cup in both hands, presents
it to the guest at his elbow, who likewise rises, and
removes the cover for his Lordship to drink, which
being successfully accomplished, the guest replaces
the cover and receives the cup into his own hands. He
then presents it to his next neighbor, that the cover
may be again removed for himself to take a draught,
after which the third person goes through a similar
manoeuvre with a fourth, and he with a fifth, until
the whole company find themselves inextricably
intertwisted and entangled in one complicated chain of
love. When the cup came to my hands, I examined it
critically, both inside and out, and perceived it to
be an antique and richly ornamented silver goblet,
capable of holding about a quart of wine. Considering
how much trouble we all expended in getting the cup to
our lips, the guests appeared to content themselves
with wonderfully moderate potations. In truth, nearly
or quite the original quart of wine being still in the
goblet, it seemed doubtful whether any of the company
had more than barely touched the silver rim before
passing it to their neighbors,--a degree of abstinence
that might be accounted for by a fastidious repugnance
to so many compotators in one cup, or possibly by a
disapprobation of the liquor. Being curious to know
all about these important matters, with a view of
recommending to my countrymen whatever they might
usefully adopt, I drank an honest sip fromthe loving-cup, and
had no occasion for another,--ascertaining it to be
Claret of a poor original quality, largely mingled
with water, and spiced and sweetened. It was good
enough, however, for a merely spectral or ceremonial
drink, and could never have been intended for any
better purpose.

The toasts now began in the customary order,
attended with speeches neither more nor less witty and
ingenious than the specimens of table eloquence which
had heretofore delighted me. As preparatory to each
new display, the herald, or whatever he was, behind
the chair of state, gave awful notice that the Right
Honorable the Lord Mayor was about to propose a toast.
His Lordship being happily delivered thereof, together
with some accompanying remarks, the band played an
appropriate tune, and the herald again issued
proclamation to the effect that such or such a
nobleman, or gentleman, general, dignified clergyman,
or what not, was going to respond to the Right
Honorable the Lord Mayor's toast; then, if I mistake
not, there was another prodigious flourish of trumpets
and twanging of stringed instruments; and, finally,
the doomed individual, waiting all this while to be
decapitated, got up and proceeded to make a fool of
himself. A bashful young earl tried his maiden
oratory on the good citizens of London, and, having
evidently got every word by heart (even including,
however he managed it, the most seemingly casual
improvisations of the moment), he really spoke like a
book, and made incomparably the smoothest speech I
ever heard in England.

The weight and gravity of the speakers, not only on
this occasion, but all similar ones, was what
impressed me as most extraordinary, not to say absurd.
Whyshould people
eat a good dinner, and put their spirits into festive
trim with Champagne, and afterwards mellow themselves
into a most enjoyable state of quietude with copious
libations of Sherry and old Port, and then disturb the
whole excellent result by listening to speeches as
heavy as an after-dinner nap, and in no degree so
refreshing? If the Champagne had thrown its sparkle
over the surface of these effusions, or if the
generous Port had shone through their substance with a
ruddy glow of the old English humor, I might have seen
a reason for honest gentlemen prattling in their cups,
and should undoubtedly have been glad to be a
listener. But there was no attempt nor impulse of the
kind on the part of the orators, nor apparent
expectation of such a phenomenon on that of the
audience. In fact, I imagine that the latter were best
pleased when the speaker embodied his ideas in the
figurative language of arithmetic, or struck upon any
hard matter of business or statistics, as a
heavy-laden bark bumps upon a rock in mid-ocean. The
sad severity, the too earnest utilitarianism, of
modern life, have wrought a radical and lamentable
change, I am afraid, in this ancient and goodly
institution of civic banquets. People used to come to
them, a few hundred years ago, for the sake of being
jolly; they come now with an odd notion of pouring
sober wisdom into their wine by way of
wormwood-bitters, and thus make such a mess of it that
the wine and wisdom reciprocally spoil one another.

Possibly, the foregoing sentiments have taken a
spice of acridity from a circumstance that happened
about this stage of the feast, and very much
interrupted my own further enjoyment of it. Up to this
time, my condition had been exceedingly felicitous,both on account of the
brilliancy of the scene, and because I was in close
proximity with three very pleasant English friends.
One of them was a lady, whose honored name my readers
would recognize as a household word, if I dared write
it; another, a gentleman, likewise well known to them,
whose fine taste, kind heart, and genial cultivation
are qualities seldom mixed in such happy proportion as
in him. The third was the man to whom I owed most in
England, the warm benignity of whose nature was never
weary of doing me good, who led me to many scenes of
life, in town, camp, and country, which I never could
have found out for myself, who knew precisely the kind
of help a stranger needs, and gave it as freely as if
he had not had a thousand more important things to
live for. Thus I never felt safer or cosier at
anybody's fireside, even my own, than at the
dinner-table of the Lord Mayor.

Out of this serene sky came a thunderbolt. His
Lordship got up and proceeded to make some very
eulogistic remarks upon "the literary and
commercial"--I question whether those two
adjectives were ever before married by a copulative
conjunction, and they certainly would not live
together in illicit intercourse, of their own
accord--"the literary and commercial attainments
of an eminent gentleman there present," and then
went on to speak of the relations of blood and
interest between Great Britain and the aforesaid
eminent gentleman's native country. Those bonds
were more intimate than had ever before existed
between two great nations, throughout all history, and
his Lordship felt assured that that whole honorable
company would join him in the expression of a fervent
wish that they might be held inviolably sacred, on
bothsides of the
Atlantic, now and forever. Then came the same
wearisome old toast, dry and hard to chew upon as a
musty sea-biscuit, which had been the text of nearly
all the oratory of my public career. The herald
sonorously announced that Mr. So-and-so would now
respond to his Right Honorable Lordship's toast
and speech, the trumpets sounded the customary
flourish for the onset, there was a thunderous rumble
of anticipatory applause, and finally a deep silence
sank upon the festive hall.

All this was a horrid piece of treachery on the
Lord Mayor's part, after beguiling me within his
lines on a pledge of safe-conduct; and it seemed very
strange that he could not let an unobtrusive
individual eat his dinner in peace, drink a small
sample of the Mansion House wine, and go away grateful
at heart for the old English hospitality. If his
Lordship had sent me an infusion of ratsbane in the
loving-cup, I should have taken it much more kindly at
his hands. But I suppose the secret of the matter to
have been somewhat as follows.

All England, just then, was in one of those
singular fits of panic excitement (not fear, though as
sensitive and tremulous as that emotion), which, in
consequence of the homogeneous character of the
people, their intense patriotism, and their dependence
for their ideas in public affairs on other sources
than their own examination and individual thought, are
more sudden, pervasive, and unreasoning than any
similar mood of our own public. In truth, I have never
seen the American public in a state at all similar,
and believe that we are incapable of it. Our
excitements are not impulsive, like theirs, but, right
or wrong, are moral and intellectual. For example, the
grand rising ofthe
North, at the commencement of this war, bore the
aspect of impulse and passion only because it was so
universal, and necessarily done in a moment, just as
the quiet and simultaneous getting-up of a thousand
people out of their chairs would cause a tumult that
might be mistaken for a storm. We were cool then, and
have been cool ever since, and shall remain cool to
the end, which we shall take coolly, whatever it may
be. There is nothing which the English find it so
difficult to understand in us as this characteristic.
They imagine us, in our collective capacity, a kind of
wild beast, whose normal condition is savage fury, and
are always looking for the moment when we shall break
through the slender barriers of international law and
comity, and compel the reasonable part of the world,
with themselves at the head, to combine for the
purpose of putting us into a stronger cage. At times
this apprehension becomes so powerful (and when one
man feels it, a million do), that it resembles the
passage of the wind over a broad field of grain, where
you see the whole crop bending and swaying beneath one
impulse, and each separate stalk tossing with the
self-same disturbance as its myriad companions. At
such periods all Englishmen talk with a terrible
identity of sentiment and expression. You have the
whole country in each man; and not one of them all, if
you put him strictly to the question, can give a
reasonable ground for his alarm. There are but two
nations in the world--our own country and France--that
can put England into this singular state. It is the
united sensitiveness of a people extremely well-to-do,
careful of their country's honor, most anxious
for the preservation of the cumbrous and moss-grown
prosperity which they have been so long in
consolidating, andincompetent (owing to the national
half-sightedness, and their habit of trusting to a few
leading minds for their public opinion) to judge when
that prosperity is really threatened.

If the English were accustomed to look at the
foreign side of any international dispute, they might
easily have satisfied themselves that there was very
little danger of a war at that particular crisis, from
the simple circumstance that their own Government had
positively not an inch of honest ground to stand upon,
and could not fail to be aware of the fact. Neither
could they have met Parliament with any show of a
justification for incurring war. It was no such
perilous juncture as exists now, when law and right
are really controverted on sustainable or plausible
grounds, and a naval commander may at any moment fire
off the first cannon of a terrible contest. If I
remember it correctly, it was a mere diplomatic
squabble, in which the British ministers, with the
politic generosity which they are in the habit of
showing towards their official subordinates, had tried
to browbeat us for the purpose of sustaining an
ambassador in an indefensible proceeding; and the
American Government (for God had not denied us an
administration of statesmen then) had retaliated with
stanch courage and exquisite skill, putting inevitably
a cruel mortification upon their opponents, but
indulging them with no pretence whatever for active
resentment.

Now the Lord Mayor, like any other Englishman,
probably fancied that War was on the western gale, and
was glad to lay hold of even so insignificant an
American as myself, who might be made to harp on the
rusty old strings of national sympathies, identityof blood and interest,
and community of language and literature, and whisper
peace where there was no peace, in however weak an
utterance. And possibly his Lordship thought, in his
wisdom, that the good feeling which was sure to be
expressed by a company of well-bred Englishmen, at his
august and far-famed dinner-table, might have an
appreciable influence on the grand result. Thus, when
the Lord Mayor invited me to his feast, it was a piece
of strategy. He wanted to induce me to fling myself,
like a lesser Curtius, with a larger object of
self-sacrifice, into the chasm of discord between
England and America, and, on my ignominious demur, had
resolved to shove me in with his own right-honorable
hands, in the hope of closing up the horrible pit
forever. On the whole, I forgive his Lordship. He
meant well by all parties,--himself, who would share
the glory, and me, who ought to have desired nothing
better than such an heroic opportunity,--his own
country, which would continue to get cotton and
breadstuffs, and mine, which would get everything that
men work with and wear.

As soon as the Lord Mayor began to speak, I rapped
upon my mind, and it gave forth a hollow sound, being
absolutely empty of appropriate ideas. I never
thought of listening to the speech, because I knew it
all beforehand in twenty repetitions from other lips,
and was aware that it would not offer a single
suggestive point. In this dilemma, I turned to one of
my three friends, a gentleman whom I knew to possess
an enviable flow of silver speech, and obtested him,
by whatever he deemed holiest, to give me at least an
available thought or two to start with, and, once
afloat, I would trust my guardian-angel forenabling me to
flounder ashore again. He advised me to begin with
some remarks complimentary to the Lord Mayor, and
expressive of the hereditary reverence in which his
office was held,--at least, my friend thought that
there would be no harm in giving his Lordship this
little sugar-plum, whether quite the fact or no,--was
held by the descendants of the Puritan forefathers.
Thence, if I liked, getting flexible with the oil of
my own eloquence, I might easily slide off into the
momentous subject of the relations between England and
America, to which his Lordship had made such weighty
allusion.

Seizing this handful of straw with a death-grip,
and bidding my three friends bury me honorably, I got
upon my legs to save both countries, or perish in the
attempt. The tables roared and thundered at me, and
suddenly were silent again. But, as I have never
happened to stand in a position of greater dignity and
peril, I deem it a stratagem of sage policy here to
close these Sketches, leaving myself still erect in so
heroic an attitude.

A note on the text

Our Old Home was first published
in Boston in separate articles in the magazine The
Atlantic Monthly, and then in book form
by Ticknor and Fields in 1863. The dedication to the book
was controversial--Emerson cut it out of his copy--since
Franklin Pierce was considered pro-Southern by these Republican
abolitionists.
Our copy-text here
is the Riverside Edition of the Complete Works of Nathaniel
Hawthorne, vol. 7, pp. 1-403, of Our Old Home and
the English Note-Books, 1883, as edited by George
Parsons Lathrop. We include the page numbers as hidden
anchors to this text, not the page numbers of the 1863
first edition nor the authoritative Centenary Edition
text copyrighted by Ohio State University Press. We have
not compared the text to these other books. We have
not noted end-of-line hyphenation decisions because
the copy-text is not authoritative--refer to the Centenary
Edition for such information. We omit the frontispiece
and Lathrop's introduction from the copy-text. The
English Note-Books, which start at the end of this copy-text
volume and continue to the next volume, will be presented
on another web page. Publishing metadata is in the HEAD
element of this file (see Page Source).

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